These special loans are subject to all kinds of rules and regulations. Looking into them I found some contradicting rules and lots of vague descriptions. A talk at the bank should clear things up. As soon as I know exactly which interest rate would apply to us, we can do the math and figure out if buying our own solar panels would be a feasible alternative.
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I never really looked into getting PV solar panels because of the great investment cost. Although, in the long run, the solar panels will pay for themselves and can even make you a nice profit. Last week I stumbled upon a website with solar power companies that are looking for roof space to install their solar panels. They could, of course, just buy or rent a big patch of land and install their solar panels there, but due to insurance issues, this isn’t a very interesting option for them. So, they are constantly looking for roof space to install their solar panels on.
As we happen to have a lot of roof space on our unused greenhouses, renting out the space to a solar company could proof quite profitable. The three biggest solar power companies in the region are all interested in our south facing roofs, so we’ll just have to wait and see who can offer us the best deal. The first of the three companies is coming over for a chat next week.
]]>1.Turn down your heater
Do you walk around in t-shirts during winter? A lot of people turn their heating up too much during colder weather. If it’s getting colder, wear a sweater instead of turning the heaters up. Turning down your heater just a single degree can help you save close to 10% of your heating bill.
2.Install energy saving light bulbs
During the short winter days we use a lot of energy to light our homes. Replacing your light bulbs with energy saving light bulbs can save a lot of energy and money. An 11 Watt energy saving light bulb produces about the same amount of light as a 60 Watts incandescent light bulb, while only using about 20% of the energy. Energy saving light bulbs are more expensive to buy, that’s why a lot of people still buy incandescent light bulbs. When factoring in the 80% energy saving and the many times longer lifetime that energy saving light bulbs have, the higher purchase price of the energy saving light bulb is a really good investment and will save you a lot of money in the long run.
3.Keep your fridge and freezer full
Your fridge and freezer are good at cooling objects placed inside of them. Common sense would probably make you believe that less things in your fridge will mean less energy is needed to keep things chilled. The opposite is true however! Once everything in your fridge or freezer has been cooled to the set temperature only very little energy is needed to keep things at that temperature, thanks to good insulation in the appliance. When you open the door, to get something out or put something in, the cold air escapes and is replaced by warm air. The cold items already in the fridge or freezer will help cool the warm air. A lot of cold is stored in the items in your fridge. Cold (or heat) storage needs mass, air in your fridge or freezer has very little mass and makes for a very bad storage medium. If you don’t have a lot of items to store in your fridge or freezer you can fill up the unused space with jugs of water. Water is a very cheap and highly effective cold storage medium.
4.Turn off your appliances when not in use.
A lot of electricity is wasted when you leave appliances in stand-by mode. Likewise, unused wall warts still use electricity when nothing is connected to them. Unplug your laptop charger, phone charger, printer and anything else that comes with one of those over sized plugs that contains a power supply.
5.Don’t use electric gadgets for things you can do manually.
We are way too used to our gadgets. I’m sure you have some electric appliances that you can easily live without. By the time you have plugged in your electric can opener, my can is already half way opened with sheer man-power! An electric can opener is a handy tool if you can’t use your hands because of an injury, but with two healthy hands, I’m opening my cans with a manual can opener that doesn’t need electricity.
These are just a few tips, there are a lot more ways to save energy. What are you doing to save energy in your home?
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You probably know how you can use a magnifying glass to concentrate solar power into a small spot and start a fire. The solar power researchers at IBM have taken it a step further and managed to concentrate incoming solar energy by a factor of 2300, equaling about 230 watts of power on a square centimeter. This energy could then be converted into about 70 watts of usable electric energy. The biggest problem with concentrating the suns rays this much is that it heats the solar cells to about 1600 degrees Celsius, which would melt them. IBM however is an expert at cooling high power computer chips and managed to keep the solar cells at a ‘cool’ 85 degrees Celsius!
Read IBM’s press release here
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In Europe, Canada and the US, the power companies are required to buy back any excess energy you create. The rates, at which they buy back the energy, depends on a few things and the rules are different in each country and state. You can get detailed information on this subject from your utility company.
Solar energy, for instance, will be paid at a higher rate than power generated with a diesel generator because it is obviously much cleaner energy. In Europe you will also get a better rate if you burn vegetable oil instead of diesel, but you will have to show proof of the origin of your oil, so waste vegetable oil collected from restaurants will not get you the higher rate, although the collected oil will be cheaper than buying new vegetable oil, possibly still making it an interesting alternative on the bottom line.
The amount of energy you can sell back also differs from each power company to the next. While some will buy back as much as you can generate, others will only buy back as much power as you buy from them, effectively leaving your power meter at the zero mark.
Since we are currently looking for a new house, I don’t know which power company we will be dealing with. Assuming, for now, that I can only sell back the amount of electricity that I use, generating our own power will not bring in any money. After working out the fuel usage for the generator and assuming that I have to buy vegetable oil to run the generator, plus the generators initial purchase price and ongoing maintenance, the bottom line is that the power from the utility company will cost about the same or maybe even a little less.
However, the electricity is not the only thing I will be generating. A big part of the energy will be lost as heat. Lost if you don’t catch it, that is! Running the engines cooling water through a heat exchanger in the central heating system will have a positive effect on the total fuel consumption of the central heating.
The whole thing can also be turned around: so, instead of running an engine to cover your power needs and use the excess heat to complement your central heating system, you could also have the engine running to generate the heat to warm your water and house, while running a generator head along side to create electricity while you are heating. Sure, ultimately we are talking about the same system, that generates heat and power, but the sizing of each system would be different.
How our system will be sizes isn’t decided yet. We will first have to find a suitable house. Depending on the age and condition of the central heating system, we will then go one way or the other.
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I dug up some old electricity bills the other day to check how much juice we have been using over the past few years. I was shocked by the numbers I found, we use about 10500 kWh a year which equals a constant load of (10500 kWh / 365 days / 24 hours =) 1.2 kW or 1200 Watts. The power usage itself isn’t the shocking part, considering we use electricity to cook on, have a bunch of other appliances that are used regularly and a few tropical aquariums, one of which is a saltwater aquarium which has some quite powerful lights and pumps. What did shock me was to see the total money spend on electricity. With a kWh costing about 24 cents, the total yearly cost for our electricity usage ads up to 2.5 grand (that is Euros, which equals about 3,700 US$!!!)
There are better things to do with that kind of money but we still need the electricity. Sure, we can probably cut down on usage, but quite frankly there are not a lot of electric comforts I want to give up. I will use an average of 1000 Watts of power usage to figure out what kind of power plant we need to build. If I take into account the small fish farm we might want to start, that adds another 1000 Watts.
I’ve already ruled out solar power because the up front costs will be too high. I do want to tap into the power that the sun delivers for free, but I will use that for heating instead of electricity generation. Wind power is another free source, but since it depends on the weather conditions I’m not too keen on that either. I will probably experiment with wind power in the near future but for now I need a better, more constant, source.
I am having a closer look at Lister-engines and the more I read about them, the more I like them. A Lister CS (cold start) engine is a diesel engine that can deliver great power for very little cost. These engines are build to run for decades, I’ve read about some that have been running 24/7 for over 40 years! And the required maintenance is very low. These engines run at low speeds of 600 – 1000 RPM, making them less noisy than regular diesel generators.
Running an engines like this hooked up to a 10 kW power generator for about 5 hours a day would be able to cover my total power consumption. The heat generated by the engine can be fed back into the central heating system. Using the generated heat would be another big money saver considering the huge increase in oil prices, currently at $95 a barrel vs. $52 per barrel in January! The oil price does not affect the running cost of the generator as it can run on waste vegetable oil, which can be collected from local restaurants for free. The restaurant owners normally have to pay to get their used cooking oil disposed of.
Since the electricity generated by the generator would be somewhat constant while it is running and the usage has spikes as appliances get turned on and off, a buffer is needed to store the generated power, so it can be used at times when the generator is not running. One way to store your electricity is in batteries, but since most homes here are connected to the electric grid, we can just use that! Solar systems are often hooked up to the grid like this, by using a special electricity meter you can have the meter run backwards when you generate more power than you use. If we feed enough power back into the grid we can start sending bills to the power company, much better than receiving their bills!
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Being self-sufficient typically refers to being able to provide your own food. When looking at utilities, like water and electricity, being your own provider is called living off-grid. While growing crops and keeping animals for food takes a lot of time and work, being able to cover all or part of your electricity and water usage is far easier. After the initial planning and installation an independent power or water system will only require a bit of maintenance every now and again.
People live off-grid for a number of reasons, some choose to, to save money, while others are forced to because of their location. What ever the reason, good planning beforehand can save a lot of trouble and grief down the road. The most important things to think about when planning your off-grid system are location, requirements and cost:
Location
Your location could narrow down the choices you have, running a diesel generator in a one bedroom, downtown apartment is something that I would not recommend. Local building regulations could come into play when you want to build a wind generator.
Requirements
How much power do you really need? Starting point should be your current power usage. The less power you need, the cheaper your system will be, so have a serious look at what uses all that electric power. Maybe there are some things you can do without or different. Things like a dryer take a lot of power to run, you could just hang your clothes on the line to dry and save some power. Electric stoves also need quite some power, a good alternative would be a gas stove. How about that big screen TV, do you really need that?
Make a list of all the electric devices you have and check how much power each of them consumes, they should all have a power rating on them somewhere. If you multiply the wattage of each device with the number of hours you have it switched on each month and divide that by 1000 you will have the total power consumption of your electrical device a month in kWh, which is the same unit of power that you can read on your electricity meter and electricity bills. For each device you should have a good think about whether you really need it or could live without. The devices you do need could have an alternative that uses far less power.
Costs
For most people the limiting factor is costs. You can have all the power you want from solar cells or a fancy big windmill, but these devices cost a lot of money. In the long run they will save you money or even make you a healthy profit, but the high up-front cost is more then most of us can handle.
A lot of people have build their own windmills from scrap with great success and share their experience on the internet for free. Find all the information you can and learn from the mistakes that others have made, so you don’t have to make them. I am still figuring out how much power our family would need to live off-grid. After that has been done, the search for our perfect off-grid system can start.
(note: the windmill picture was shamelessly ripped from The Back Shed)
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