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.

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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.

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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.

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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: Read the rest of this entry

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.

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