[NCLUG] Re: "Green" power -- off grid

[danbob]

Hi Paul -- I had no choice about off-grid, of course, I live 12 miles
from the nearest power pole.  I built my house from scratch to be as
energy efficient as possible. Passive solar heating from big, slanted
south facing windows (the entire south wall), and thermal mass to store
it. My heating bill is zero, except chainsaw gas and sweat for firewood
when its cold out. I have the most efficient lighting (CF) and
appliances available--on-demand hot water, efficient and SMALL fridge,
efficient dishwasher modded to cut out the heating coils, and so on. LCD
television, no plasma. It's also a SMALL house.

Because of very heavy processor demands, (desktop publishing books with
Scribus) my only concession to 'regular' appliances is desktop computers
and network, laptops just don't cut it and I need a BIG screen (LCD of
course) to lay out books. My computer/network draws 250 watts in
operation.

I have 500 watts of PV, and a tiny 7 ft diameter 500w wind turbine. I
use about 100 kwh per month which this system easily provides; the
average US home uses 750 kwh/month (source -- US Energy Information
Administration, since citations seem to be called for on this thread
recently).

If you can build your home from scratch to be energy-efficient, you are
in front of the 8 ball on going off grid. If you are trying to retro-fit
an existing home, best spend your money on super-efficient appliances,
insulation, solar hot water, and such....and THEN do the math for PV,
wind, etc.

DAN FINK



On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 10:58 -0600, Paul Hummer wrote:
> > And the new Li batteries are great, but expensive....just for
> > fun, I priced them to run my house (I'm off grid). Including all the
> > special charging equipment, it was just under $100k for 20 kwh capacity,
> > for which my current lead-acid batteries cost $2k
> 
> I would be VERY interested in knowing the process you took to get off
> the grid.  That's a life-goal of mine.  While I don't think that my
> entire house will be off the grid anytime soon, if I could offload
> devices that need to be "always on" onto something that I'm not paying
> the monthly for (servers, etc.), then it'd be a good start.
> 
> Last item I looked, solar power was getting cheaper, and I thought
> (theoretically) that I might just be able to run off solar power during
> the day (when I obviously don't need lights, etc), and then switch to
> the grid at night.  That way, I'm technically only paying far
> electricity that ~10 hours out of the day.  There were some issues with
> that, but I don't remember the big ones.
> 
>