Economical Solar Electric Living
Jul. 21st, 2005 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonA decent, very basic article here: Economical Solar Electric Living
We're going for microhydro (probably next year, at this point), because it's the most cost-efficient system (24/7 power generation), we're lucky enough to have a couple of good-sized streams, and I've got a backhoe to do the trenching I'll need to do, but even there, a dry year and the middle of the summer could see enough drop in flow to cut back the power such that we'd want to supplement it with some PV solar panels up on a pole somewhere. The alternative is a gas or diesel generator, and we've got one now for emergencies, but since the whole point is to get away from oil-based electricity, I don't want to be depending on that for regular or even seasonal use.
The nice thing about being on-grid from the start is that we can phase in the electrical production without having to go to oil lamps and the like in the meantime (and how *do* you run a 802.11b/g wireless LAN off kerosene...) Slowly weaning off of the grid is much gentler than going cold-turkey ;>
My wood-fired central boiler/furnace and the big 950-gallon hot water storage tank (think: heat battery) that makes it an efficient alternative to gas or oil are supposed to be in within a couple of weeks. If anyone's interested, I'll post pics as I go through the process of putting it in. It's a somewhat daunting project, but we'll muddle through, I hope, with only a few days in there of having to heat our water for bathing on the stove (or go swimming in the stream instead, easier in August than November...) And when it's done, heat becomes free but for the effort to cut, split and stack the wood. That's a big deal in New England -- in all of 2004 I spent about $2200 for oil for the boiler for heat and to make the hot water, and this year I've already spent $1800, because of the higher oil prices. Ouch. Granted, this is a big house, but you can see why so many folks out here use wood stoves. At those kind of rates (and they'll only go up and up), the wood burner pays for itself inside of a couple of years, particularly if you've got your own source of wood. As natural gas prices spike (several years after oil, perhaps), grid electricity prices will start to similarly rise. Now would be a good time to start replacing all of your light bulbs with Compact Fluorescents. Just doing that cut a good chunk off my electric bill, and the CF bulbs last much longer, too, saving me having to replace bulbs all the time.
And they do make wood-fired hot tubs, which is cool. I'm hoping to at some point figure a way to heat the one we've got in the greenhouse from the central wood furnace instead of from electricity, through some sort of heat exchanger -- I'll tell ya, after a day of splitting wood, a hot tub is not so much a luxury when yer back is well past its 20s ;>
By thw way, for those who have read this far and are tea addicts, check out the lovely English copper kettles at Lehman's. I just got one of the beehive ones with the coil bottoms (for gas stoves -- they have flat bottomed ones for electric), and $40 is seriously cheap for what you get -- it's very solid, as well as beautiful, and I expect it to last a loooong time.
We're going for microhydro (probably next year, at this point), because it's the most cost-efficient system (24/7 power generation), we're lucky enough to have a couple of good-sized streams, and I've got a backhoe to do the trenching I'll need to do, but even there, a dry year and the middle of the summer could see enough drop in flow to cut back the power such that we'd want to supplement it with some PV solar panels up on a pole somewhere. The alternative is a gas or diesel generator, and we've got one now for emergencies, but since the whole point is to get away from oil-based electricity, I don't want to be depending on that for regular or even seasonal use.
The nice thing about being on-grid from the start is that we can phase in the electrical production without having to go to oil lamps and the like in the meantime (and how *do* you run a 802.11b/g wireless LAN off kerosene...) Slowly weaning off of the grid is much gentler than going cold-turkey ;>
My wood-fired central boiler/furnace and the big 950-gallon hot water storage tank (think: heat battery) that makes it an efficient alternative to gas or oil are supposed to be in within a couple of weeks. If anyone's interested, I'll post pics as I go through the process of putting it in. It's a somewhat daunting project, but we'll muddle through, I hope, with only a few days in there of having to heat our water for bathing on the stove (or go swimming in the stream instead, easier in August than November...) And when it's done, heat becomes free but for the effort to cut, split and stack the wood. That's a big deal in New England -- in all of 2004 I spent about $2200 for oil for the boiler for heat and to make the hot water, and this year I've already spent $1800, because of the higher oil prices. Ouch. Granted, this is a big house, but you can see why so many folks out here use wood stoves. At those kind of rates (and they'll only go up and up), the wood burner pays for itself inside of a couple of years, particularly if you've got your own source of wood. As natural gas prices spike (several years after oil, perhaps), grid electricity prices will start to similarly rise. Now would be a good time to start replacing all of your light bulbs with Compact Fluorescents. Just doing that cut a good chunk off my electric bill, and the CF bulbs last much longer, too, saving me having to replace bulbs all the time.
And they do make wood-fired hot tubs, which is cool. I'm hoping to at some point figure a way to heat the one we've got in the greenhouse from the central wood furnace instead of from electricity, through some sort of heat exchanger -- I'll tell ya, after a day of splitting wood, a hot tub is not so much a luxury when yer back is well past its 20s ;>
By thw way, for those who have read this far and are tea addicts, check out the lovely English copper kettles at Lehman's. I just got one of the beehive ones with the coil bottoms (for gas stoves -- they have flat bottomed ones for electric), and $40 is seriously cheap for what you get -- it's very solid, as well as beautiful, and I expect it to last a loooong time.
