Happy Earth Day!
For us the idea of Earth Day is an everyday affair. It is our passion and our challenge and, likely, our duty to the future, to keep our planet healthy. Being "Green" is a way of life, not a one day a year experiment. Our recent big project was finally upgrading our electric system and completing our Solar PV (Photo Voltaic) panel array.
We have been working on our power system here since 1977. When we moved to this very rural property and began to build our home the electricity diverted away from the highway and up over the mountain, about a mile before it got to us. The price to get the power down to our location was way out of our reach. No problem, we had spent plenty of time living and working with kerosene lamplight, we were young, our eyesight good, and we already had a propane refrigerator and wood heat and cook stoves.
This served us well for a few years, until our oldest daughter, then 9, wanted to read to herself and her siblings in her bedroom. We got wall mounted kerosene lamp fixtures for her room and then realized that one pillow fight and the whole house could burn down! We became the lighting police and worried constantly. As a result we soon rigged up a car battery to a 12 volt interior lamp from an RV. This worked great but the battery did not last long, so we collected several and then, when we made the long drive to town in our pick-up truck, charged all the batteries with a jumper cable from the truck battery that came out the hood and wove through the mirror and passenger side door handle into the back of the truck where they were hooked up. You had to be careful not to forget when you went to get out of the truck!
Once the early PV panels became available we were able to get some of the used Arco PV panels that had been removed from some huge installation I believe AmTrak or some such had dismantled. If you know any off-grid "Old Timers", chances are they have had some of these Arco panels. Thus began our love affair with off-grid renewable energy.
It has been a long and adventurous road since then. The technology has changed and improved dramatically over the years and it is amazing to see what you can do setting up a new system, off-grid or inter-tie, these days. For those of us who are just upgrading it is a bit more difficult. Since we often have to match our old equipment (preferable to discarding it and starting anew) finding compatible PV panels and parts to fill out an existing system can be challenging. Luckily we found a great deal on used panels from - you got it - a large project that had been disassembled! It is like coming full circle.
What we have achieved is a system big enough to power our home and business without having to check if the washing machine is on spin cycle before we use the soap cutter or laser printer. We switched from 12 volt to 24 volt and got a bigger inverter to convert the power to 120volt. Now all we have to do is rewire the 12 volt house!
The system has 8 - 75 to 85 watt BP PV panels, 7 - 80 watt AEE PV panels, which match perfectly and are alternated on the array, and 5 new panels (on lower left), slightly larger Solec 80 watt panels, to fill it out. These, along with our Whisper H80 wind generator, charge the 8 deep cycle Rolls batteries that actually run the house. A new OutBack 3.5KW 24Volt inverter rounds it out, although there are other misc. charge controllers and gadgets as well. We also have a small pelton wheel for micro-hydro power but, until we switch it up to 24 volt as well, it is off line.
Even though we are now more power - full than ever, we still have to be mindful of our power usage. Living on batteries is sometimes quite limited. Particularly when it is cloudy, windless weather. Powering down everything when not in use, from lightbulbs to this computer, is essential. Everything with a standby load is on a powerstrip we can turn off.
But since I cannot tell an Amp from an Ohm, that is the sum of my "Tech-Talk". I just love being able to reap the benefits - like writing on this blog on my solar electric powered iMac!
Want to reap a little solar power from us? Try a bar of our "solar powered soap"! All the ingredients came from plants powered by photo synthesis, and all the machinery involved runs on our alternative energy system. Go here to see our soaps.
2 comments:
I just have to brag a bit:
We upgraded our main system to 24 volt last year and just finished putting the hydro back on line, upgraded to 24 vt and further down the hill. Just in time for some badly needed precipitation. WOW! We are power-full. How decadent running for the first time ever the electric part of our solar water heater tank. We even put one of those electric oil-filled radiators in the bathroom just to burn off extra power. Oh how sweet it is!
...And in March of 2014 we added more solar PV panels to our array, bringing our solar up to 4 kilowatt. No one can ever tell we are 'off-grid'. We have plenty of power for home and business.
Our system is small, but every year more large 'Green' energy systems are installed that are helping reduce our need for fossil fuels while keeping up our standard of living with electrical needs. Yay!
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