Making change from the grass roots. Here is a guy in the perpetually overcast town of Arcata Ca. that manages to heat and power his home with solar panels and heat pumps. This gentleman gives a nicely detailed description of cost analysis, products and results.
"Air source heat pumps warm you eco-groovily" – September 30, 2008
Rocky Drill
Special to the Eye
http://www.arcataeye.com/...
Anybody familiar with Sunny Brae, California, near Arcata on the North Coast, can tell you it is overcast much of the year and prone to rain. Arcata averages almost 40 inches of rain a year and 186 overcast days, plus 102 partly cloudy days on average. Sunny Brae is just a little south of Arcata toward Eureka.
While living up there I have personally seen it rain: everyday in November, 5" over a 4 day Thanksgiving weekend, 3 inches in a single day, rain at least once every month of the year and rain sideways... sometimes slightly up and sideways. And that was nothing... my friends up the cost on the Smith River took 110" of rain a year. The drive-in in Crescent City is only open during the summer...
Every card board box I had stuff still packed in melted or molded, my car interior smelled like mold, my books smelled like mold, every exposed piece of metal on my car and bike rusted.
It averages 45 to 55 most of the winter, 55 to 65 sometimes 69 most of the summer. It is not unusual for it be socked in and 65 on the 4th of July and 110 when you hit Redding or 105 when you hit Williams in the valley a few hours away.
Not exactly the kind of hot climate you would expect solar to be effective in.
Through a fluke or accident of law in California, the utility corporation Pacific Gas & Electric is required to purchase surplus power from customers generating PV current from solar panels. Being the benevolent corporation they are (pun intended... think the heroes of the Erin Brockovich movie), PG&E often resists, puts up fees and many obstacles trying to keep the public from exercising their right to hook up their systems and sell back their excess power. They are in fact legendary for it:
http://www.solarwarrior.com/...
Unfortunately, Mr. Adelman's links to the SJ Mercury News and Santa Cruz Sentinel articles are not operational. I have read them in the past. Mr. Adelman's experience is far from unique.
So for now, it is current state law that PG&E has to buy back your excess power. That is where Mr. Drill's article (I have no idea whether that is his name or not, though he does mention his wife's name) comes in.
Mr. Drill lists the power and size of his panels, the fact that PG&E will only give you credit on your electricity, PG&E will not let you pay the gas portion of your bill and other excellent details. It being cold, damp and overcast for many months of the winter from say Oct.-Nov. to the following April, wood and propane for those out of town and natural gas and wood in town would be common ways to heat the home. The wood stove being very common... think pine, cedar and redwood forests everywhere.
Mr Drill gives us the run down:
"Six years ago my wife and I had a 2.5 kW photovoltaic (PV) system installed on our home in Sunny Brae. It worked great and produced all the electricity we needed to run our home..."
Able to power a home in an overcast environment:
"Six months later we realized that we were now making a lot more electricity than we needed and were selling it to PG&E. When we’d settle up our yearly bill with PG&E, the utility would owe us about $225 for the power we sold them..."
Mr Drill decided on efficient heat pumps for winter heat and used the electricity credit to pay for the supplemental electricity for heat. As a note: I have a relative who studied abroad in Japan for a year. She said the same model of heat pump is very common in Japan and very efficient... Engineering Major, I took her word on that...
"So I bought two Samsung air-source heat pumps (12,000 BTU each) over the Internet and put them in myself. I had an HVAC licensed installer do the final two- to three- hour refrigerant hookup and then I set up two meters to measure the electrical power used to run both heat pumps. The final cost came in at $4,400, not including my labor. I got data from the meters for five out of the eight months of the heating season (October to May), extrapolated that data for the entire eight-month season and then compared it to our gas and firewood usage for the last four years."
"The heat pumps worked great. They kept our 1,900 sq. ft. home at a comfortable 70 F for the entire heating season without any extra heat from our wood stove or gas furnace and did it using only 2,000 kWh. The cost of this electricity was less than the $225 yearly credit we had with PG&E, so we got to heat our home for free and we saved another $500-600 by not having to buy any gas or wood."
"The pumps created a very comfortable constant type of heat, similar to radiant floor heating, and they worked fine even when the outside temperature dropped to 33 F (rated to deliver 12,000 BTU at 47 F). When temperatures fell to freezing and below, the heat pumps still worked but decreased in efficiency and output (rated to deliver 6,700 BTU at 17 F). December of 2007 was colder than usual, but the heat pumps consumed on average only 12.6 kWh/day that month."
So here is a guy who used the facts, analyzed the situation and came up with his own alternative energy solutions. Grass roots, bottom up.
Many of you in the midwest west and Ohio may be way more knowledgeable than Californians when it comes to heat pumps and home heating in general. The idea is if we can share information and learn, then we are more able to put it into action at our own local personal level.
Energy, Food and Fiber are a start to taking things under personal control and rejecting US corporate mindless consumerism.
Re-inflating that debt bubble to get you all to go shopping on credit for Christmas crap you don't need and re-inflate that housing bubble is 20th century economics. Won't work. Not with aggregate debt at historic highs as a percentage of GDP. We better come up with some new ways to approach things...
Hats off to Mr Drill for researching it, installing it and sharing his plans, experience and expertise.
From the bottom up.
Additional Information:
Millionsolarroofs.org
http://millionsolarroofs.org/
American Solar Energy Society
http://www.ases.org/
NOTE: For those of you in the snow belt, what is your main source of heat and what is it costing you? Thanks.