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In other articles I've discussed that the first step to becoming more energy efficient and planning for renewable energy system implementation is to know exactly what you are consuming.  Once you are able to fully understand your consumption habits, it's easy to "pick the low hanging fruit" and make some rather drastic changes that are better for the environment and your wallet.

In our home, we've made some changes to reduce our energy consumption and have seen some encouraging results.  Our second step is now to pin point exactly where our current reduced electric loads are coming from and to fine tune them before planning for a renewable energy system implementation.  This is where research on Smart Electricity Monitors came into play.  For us, it came down to 3 choices:

Kill A Watt from P3 International is a single plug monitor that you can use to monitor and bench mark each 110v outlet and do all the calculations manually.  Although the cheapest option, not really a candidate for what we wanted to achieve as there is not "total home consumption" real-time monitoring, history to run reports and trending and the biggest downfall being it could not monitor 220v large appliances.  We still may purchase a couple of these are they are very affordable, have great reviews and can give you "at the plug" readings.

Cent-a-Meter was a close second as it is a home energy consumption model that is connected to your entrance electrical panel via CT clips and monitors real time electricity used.  It has a nice wireless receiver that you can bring around the house if you wish.  The cons of the product is it uses batteries for the sending unit and the receiver.  It provided the real-time data I was looking for but no software for archiving, trending etc...

T.E.D, The Energy Detective is the unit we actually purchased.  This unit has great reviews and bundled with the Footprints software, does everything I ever wanted and then some.  It does not require batteries, however it does use panel electricity to operate.  About .08cents a month according to the site.  It also comes with CT clips for easy installation and the receiver unit plugs into any wall outlet.  I purchased the additional software package Footprints so I can connect the receiver to a computer via USB and see a real-time dashboard chalk full of information including 13 month historic data retention. 

Stay tuned for a full product review on The Energy Detective once I receive and set it up to see if it stands up to it's claims on their website.  In the meantime check out this video review from Mavromatic which is very well done and detailed.

What electricity monitor do you have setup in your home?  Has it been of value?  Has it contributed to reducing your energy consumption?  Has it paid for itself?  Questions i'll be answering myself as well...

Courtesy of The Energy Detective

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Help Sizing Home GenSet

Whether using a GenSet to charge up battery banks or power your home as a backup to grid failure, you must take the same steps used to size a renewable energy system to ensure you are sizing your generator properly.  You must never run your generator at maximum output for more then 30 minutes and in a perfect world this should only be to support start-up loads. 

This chart is only to be used as a rough guide to get started.  You must identify and calculate all electrical loads your generator will support and size properly.  Always keep future additions in mind, more is always better in this case.

When selecting a home genset, consider the run time to cover your battery bank charge or emergency power supply, fuel availability, safety and convenience of use as well as load.  Whether installing a home generator for piece of mind during a grid failure or as a part of your off-grid system, the addition of a properly sized and installed GenSet will increase the value and marketability of your home.

Check out these great deals on home generators from eBay!

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In the last two articles in the Solar Energy Primer we discussed how to reduce energy consumption and Solar Panels.  In this article we will discuss DC to AC Inverters and the different models on the market.

The AC inverter is the heart of your Renewable Energy Systems Power Panel.  Unless you want to revert back to really old school where the only off-grid options where a battery bank and 12volt RV appliances, it is necessary to have an AC Inverter.  The basic function of an Inverter is to take input DC voltage (VDC) and convert it to AC voltage (VAC).  It's secondary function is to charge a battery bank should you chose to have one.  Most grid tie systems don't have a battery bank, but could have one for backup power supply.  If you are off-grid, a battery bank is a requirement.  During times of none sufficient power supply from your renewable energy systems, the inverter will convert DC power from the battery bank to AC power for your home appliances.

Electricity can be viewed as a Sine Wave, which is a mathematical function that can be viewed as a graph.  You can search the Internet for more information, but for our purpose think of Sine Waves as the purity of the electricity provided by your inverter to your appliances.

There are 4 types of Inverters:

• Square Wave Power Inverter - These are very inexpensive and not to be used for home systems.  Usually in the under 500W range, you will see these inverter types used in cars and boats and plug into a cigarette lighter.
• Modified Sine Wave Power Inverter - One of the most popular inverters due to its economic price, it produces and AC wave form somewhere between Square Wave and Pure Sine Wave.  These inverters are sometimes called Quasi-Sine are less expensive and work with most AC appliances.  Some appliances without a regulator will cause a buzzing sound and some appliances such as motors that use speed controls or timers will not function with these inverters.  Modified Sine Wave Inverters are recommended for small cottage use or boats, but not your average home use.
• True Sine Wave Power Inverter - These inverters produce the cleanest power and work best with all AC powered appliances in your home.  Although True Sine Inverters are more expensive, it is worth every penny.  After spending your hard earned money on producing your energy via Solar, Wind or Mini-Hydro, the last thing you want is to then lose it and/or produce "dirty" power.  True Sine Wave Inverters are now very affordable and are really the only way to go for off-grid home AC inverter use.
• Grid Tie Power Inverters- If you are already connected to the Utility, you can stay that way with a Grid Tie Inverter and use the Utility as your backup power.  As an added bonus, most Utilities now provide "net-metering" which allows you to sell your extra power to them.  This in effect means during peak producing hours, and after your optional battery banks have been charges, you will sell your extra power back to the Utility actually spining your meter backwards.  The Grid Tie Inverters are True Sine Wave Inverters with a added function of sensing your power consumption and synchronizing with the Utility to sell it and push to the grid.  It also has a safety feature to sense power failure from the grid and if so, cease pushing electricity.  This is a safety feature for Utility workers to ensure no home electricity is powering the grid while the workers are repairing the issue.

When configuring your Renewable Energy System keep in mind that all your DC components such as Solar Panel array, Battery Bank and Inverters all need to run on the same voltage.  In followup articles we will discuss wiring run length and gauge.  These are all tied into selecting the proper VDC for your system.

You may be wondering what to do with your heavy usage appliances like stove and dryer?  Well you can compatible inverters in series to double the ouput voltage.  You would use this technique to produce 220-240 volts required for these heavy appliances.  You can also configure them in parallel to double your power.  We will cover these topics in much more details in later follow-up articles in Solar Power Primer series so stay tuned!

Keep it Green...

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In the first part of Solar Energy Primer we discussed the prequel of planning your renewable energy system, reduced consumption and calculating the consumption of your main appliances.  Part two of Solar Energy Primer will discuss Solar Panels.  Subsequent parts of Solar Energy Primer will cover Power Inverters, Charge Controllers, Batteries and more... so stay tuned!

Solar Panels, also called Photovoltaic (PV), convert the sun's energy into electricity we can use to power our appliances and run our homes.  In very basic terms, solar panels capture photons in thin silicon wafers which cause electrons to get "excited" and move, thus producing electricity.  A solar panel is a collection of silicon solar cells wired in series to produce a specific voltage.

There are 3 basic types of Solar Panels on the market today:

• Monocrystalline: The most efficient and expensive solar panels are made with Monocrystalline cells. Long silicon rods are produced which are cut into slices of .2 to .4 mm thick discs or wafers which are then processed into individual cells that are wired together in the solar panel.
• Polycrystalline: Usually called Multi-crystalline, Polycrystalline cells are slightly less expensive and efficient as Monocrystalline cells because they are grown in a large block of crystals rather then on long silicon rod like Monocrystalline crystals.
• Amorphous: Usually called Thin-Film, a thin layer of silicon deposited on a base material such as metal or glass to create the solar panel. Amorphous solar panels are cheaper, but much less efficient then Monocrystalline or Polycrystalline panel.  Although less effective, Amorphous solar panels can be made into long sheets of roofing material to cover large areas of a south facing roof surface.

It is important to note that PV panels produce Direct Current (DC) electricity or most commonly called VDC.  Our home appliances require Alternate Current (AC) power (VAC), thus a power inverter is required to convert DC to AC power we will use in our homes.  We will get into Power Inverters and Chargers in Part 3, but keep this in mind that we are talking DC Volts when discussing raw electricity produced from Solar.

A typical 12V PV panel contains 36 solar cells and be rated up to 100 watts.  Solar Panels above 100W are usually 24V, two 36 solar cells wired in series.  It's more common to see 24V or 48V (two 24V wired in series) systems installed than 12V systems.  The advantage is the higher the voltage, the smaller the wire gauge required to transfer the electricity to from the solar array to the inverter.  The inverter will be configured to accept the VDC from the Solar Array and convert it to VAC for home appliance use.  In solar energy systems that have a battery bank to charge, the inverter will drop the higher 24V or 48V to charge the battery bank and when necessary convert the 12VDC from the battery bank to 120VAC.

Stay tuned for more Solar Energy Primer series covering Solar Energy Systems.

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In our quest to lower our energy bill and in essence reduce our energy consumption, we completed a few list items with regards to hot water.  We installed a hot water tank insulation blanket, lowered the preset on the tank and ran insulation from the hot water tank to the faucets.

I've read that if your water heater is new you may not need an insulation blanket.  Rule of thumb seems to be if you place your hand on the water heater and feel warmth, then you will save money using a thermal blanket.  For the minimal cost of $20-$30 dollars I think it's a wise investment either way.  Wrapping the heater with an insulation blanket can reduce heat loss by up to 45% and save you approximately 4% to 8% in electricity cost to heat your water.  We plan on also sitting the tank on a rigid insulation foam board which is supposed to further reduce heat loss through the floor.  Another item we're looking at installing is Anti-Convection Valves, but still researching these to see if it makes sense.

Before we put the insulation blanket on the water heater we turned the temperature down to 120F.  It was preset to 145F and so far showering has not been a problem ;o)  This move not only helps save on energy, but makes our taps safer for our young son, win-win.

Last thing we did in this project was wrap the copper pipes with foam insulation.  There are a few choices of wraps, but we went with foam pipe wrap simply for the cost and ease of installation.  We hope to see a substantial return on investment.  Total cost was $25 for the insulation blanket and $15 in foam insulation.  The insulation blanket went on pretty easy with minor trim for the power cable.  We used Tyvek tape usually used for house wrap vapor barrier to attach the blanket together.  Tyvek is by far the best adhesive tape for this job, which was also used to keep the foam insulation together as well.