Tag Archives: home-solutions

measures that apply on a single household scale

Let’s Blow this Joint

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I have a confession to make. When we moved into our current house three years ago, we had to sell our clothes dryer due to gas/electric incompatibility (happens every time we move!). So we lived without a dryer for three years, hanging clothes out to dry, and generally being frugal about washing vs. re-wearing clothes. Well, after several weather-induced trips to the laundromat this winter, we (or can I lay this all at my wife’s feet?) finally broke down and bought a used washer/dryer set on Craigslist. We’ll still let the sun dry our clothes 95% of the time, but have other options now.

Even though this little vignette does relate to the common Do the Math theme of low-energy lifestyles, the actual point of bringing it up is that the washer/dryer came from a house that had just been on display as a model for energy efficiency—including the washer and dryer. At the house, we met Jason Beckman, of Classic Residential, Inc., who had carried out many of the efficiency upgrades to the house. I thought it would be instructive to have him perform an energy audit at our home—especially a blower door test to expose ventilation issues.

As a bonus, after the nominal audit activities were over, I was able to spend some quality time with the blower door, doing extensive tests in virtually every room in the house. What I found was certainly instructive for me, and hopefully will be useful to a broad audience as well.

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Death of a Battery

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Four 150 A-h 12-V golf-cart batteries

Four golf-cart batteries used in my off-grid home PV system. Each is 12 V, 150 A-h, thus 1.8 kWh of storage.

All the metrics looked great. The 2.7-year-old lead acid batteries in my off-grid photovoltaic system appeared to have settled into a consistent mid-life performance. Monthly maintenance (equalizing, adding distilled water) promised to keep the batteries in prime condition for some time to come. Based on cycle depth, I expected another 2.5 years out of the present set of batteries. Life was good.

Then, during my absence over the course of Thanksgiving weekend, one of the batteries expired. No forewarning. Just gave up. A previous post expressed an overall disappointment in batteries, now reinforced by this sudden nosedive.

In this post, I’ll show the metrics on my system detailing the demise of “Battery E.” The gruesome graphics are intended for mature audiences.

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This Thermal House

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[A parallel treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook.]

If you want to make your house more efficient at repelling the unpleasantness outdoors (whether hot or cold), what should you do first? Insulate the walls? Insulate the ceiling? The roof? Better windows? Draft elimination? What has the biggest effect? While I have regrettably little practical experience tightening up a house (it’s on my bucket list), I at least do understand heat transfer from a physics/engineering perspective, and can walk through some insightful calculations. So let’s build a fantasy house and evaluate thermal tradeoffs at 1234 Theoretical Lane.

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Blow-by-Blow PV System Efficiency: A Case Study for Storage

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A short while back, I described my standalone (off-grid) urban photovoltaic (PV) energy system. At the time, I promised a follow-up piece evaluating the realized efficiency of the system. What was I thinking? The resulting analysis is a lot of work! But it was good for me, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you lot as well. I’ll go ahead and give you the final answer: 62%. So you could peel away now and risk using this number out of context, or you could come with me into the rabbit hole…

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Rocking the AC

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When it comes up in casual conversation that I do not generally heat or cool my house, people either move to another seat or look at me with some mixture of admiration and disbelief. When non-Californians then find out that I live in San Diego, they might huff or spew, which often involves some embarrassing projectile escaping their mouth. But the locals are more consistently impressed—more so by my forsaking heat than AC (San Diego has very mild summers by U.S. standards). This summer, I turned on the AC for the first time since we bought the house three years ago. All in the name of science! I was blown away. Here is what I learned.

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My Modest Solar Setup

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I have made repeated references in past posts to the modest off-grid photovoltaic (PV) system I built to cover a large share of our—again modest—electricity usage.  By popular demand, I’ll take you on a tour of the system: it’s history, its composition, and adaptation to my house.

In 2007, I acquired a single, second-hand solar panel—intent on doing something useful with it. Confronted with a variety of options, and eager to explore multiple paths, I purchased a second panel and proceeded to set up a dual system: two stand-alone off-grid PV systems mounted side by side. It was really cool. I was able to power my television console and living room lights off of the two systems, while experimenting with different components and learning to live (part of) my life on natural power. I wrote a comprehensive article about how to size and design such a system, which may be worth reading first. Since that initial success, I have incrementally expanded my system so that I now get more than half of my electrical power from eight panels sitting in the sun. This is their story.

I have enough to say about my solar setup (and PV systems in general) that I must break this topic into multiple posts. In this, the first, I will describe the components, functions, and evolution of the system. In a future post, I will present system performance data and an assessment of efficiency of the various components. Perhaps even later I can explore the impacts of panel orientation, tracking, horizon obstructions, and geographic location.

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TED-Stravaganza

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My wife calls it spying. I call it data. To-may-to, To-mah-to. It’s true that I know what she’s been up to (electrically) while I’m away. And it’s true that I can access this information anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. But domestic surveillance is not my aim (cameras and microphones would be far more informative in that regard). I just care about the energy angle.

In this post, I will present example results from monitoring and recording my home electricity use, demonstrating the marvelous secret world it reveals. My interest lies in putting numbers on my own behaviors, and in characterizing the appliances in my house. Some of this rubs off on my wife, and some of it rubs her the wrong way. But as I explained in an earlier post, I kept a note she once wrote that said: “Okay, TED’s pretty cool.”

Who is TED? TED is The Energy Detective. That same earlier post told the story of TED’s tortured journey to our home—a tale of excitement, rejection, and ultimate acceptance.

This post is not meant to convey anything deep and meaningful about the energy challenges we face, except for the fact that those challenges provided a background motivation for me to explore and monitor energy data in my home (it should be obvious by now that I’m a data-holic). Rather, I will simply showcase a number of data captures from TED so you can see for yourself the interesting hidden behaviors of appliances, and develop some intuition about how much of a toll various devices take.

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Heat Pumps Work Miracles

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[An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook.]

Part of the argument that we cannot expect growth to continue indefinitely is that efficiency gains are capped. Many of our energy applications are within a factor of two of theoretical efficiency limits, so we can’t squeeze too much more out of this orange. After all, nothing can be more than 100% efficient, can it? Well, it turns out there is one domain in which we can gleefully break these bonds and achieve far better than 100% efficiency: heat pumps (includes refrigerators). Even though it sounds like magic, we still must operate within physical limits, naturally. In this post, I explain how this is possible, and develop the thermodynamic limit to heat engines and heat pumps. It’s a story of entropy.

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Burning Desire for Efficiency

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Ever wonder how efficient it is to heat water? Of course you have! Ever measured it? Whoa, mister, now you’ve gone too far!

I recently devised a laser-phototransistor gauge to monitor my natural gas meter dial—like ya do. As a side benefit, I acquired good data on how much energy goes into various domestic uses of natural gas. Using this, I was able to figure out how much energy it takes to heat water on the stove, cook something in the oven, or heat water for a shower. Together with the knowledge of the heat capacity of water, I can compute heating efficiency from my measurements. What could be more fun? I’ll share the results here, some of which surprised me.

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My Neighbors Use Too Much Energy

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[An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 20 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook.]

From www.christmasvacationcollectibles.com

I have described in a series of posts the efforts my wife and I have made to reduce our energy footprint on a number of fronts. The motivation stems from our perception that the path we are on is not sustainable. Our response has been to pluck the low-hanging fruit, demonstrating to ourselves that we can live a “normal” life using far less energy than we once did. We are by no means gold medalists in this effort, but our savings have nonetheless been substantial. Now we shift the burden off of ourselves, and onto our neighbors. You don’t have to run faster than the bear—just faster than the other guy. In this post, I summarize our savings relative to the national average, add a few more tidbits not previously covered, put the savings in context, and muse about ways to extend the reach of such efforts.

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