In it was a handout touting the cooperative’s dedication to service to its members. The coop power had been out for over 3 hours at that time, owing to a car vs. pole incident. A neighbor had power because I could hear the generator buzzing. I had power, too, but nobody could hear it.
Back to the power bill. I have been waiting for it with glee. How often to you hear of that? Pretty often when you are dealing with people who enhance with solar.
This was the culmination of efforts on one of my latest solar experiments. I have done a writeup on the whole deal, but I just thought I’d show the power bill first. $50. There was a time when I would have thought that was terrible. $9 of it was for electricity and the rest of it was….terrible. Fortunately I “don’t have” grid intertie, or they’d tack on another $50 service fee.
What I have done is put the “generator circuit” and a/c completely on solar. That left the big stuff. I added a limiting grid-tie apparatus that helped during the day, but it wasted a lot of power fighting for the solar. The latest revision is battery enhanced grid-tie. It works all day, all night and the two units never fight. This is what happened to the bill.
The reason any use showed up at all is that the oven and the clothes dryer each run at about 5kw and the little grid tie units I use are only good up to 1900 watts with the sun shining and a bit less at night. Several blackberry cobblers were baked last month, running up the power consumption, but well worth the expense of about 13 cents each. I’ll release the full story on this project in a day or so.–Neal