Decisions, decisions
We've got a fairly large wad of money that's been sitting in a CD for the past 6 months, and it just came due yesterday. I could roll it back into a CD, of course, but CDs are not all that portable and would leave my money at the risk of becoming pretty wallpaper if last year's 3.5% inflation decided to speed up a bit for the summer season.
Of course, there's the traditional survivalist investment strategy of BUY GOLD! AND GUNS! (and then, presumably, you can make the gold into bullets and use it to defend yourself against other libertarian survivalists), but that's just too Heinlein to be considered seriously.
So what I'm thinking about is the treehugger US$600 diy solar kit, which could be upgraded into a small solar+wind setup for about US$2000 (with a 30% tax credit on the solar component of the system [as far as I can tell, the only tax shelter for wind power is if you're an industrial producer] which would translate into about a US$450 tax credit.)
With a beefed-up setup like this, I could pull my home servers (~170w for the servers, the switch, and the cable modem; US$14/month + "taxes" paid directly to Enron) off the grid now, and get some experience running a small solar array so when we get around to moving to Canada building our summer camp in Canada somewhere in the countryside, I could put together a off-grid system to provide us with electrical essentials (lights, icebox, water heater(?), computers) without running quite so much of a risk of converting our nice little wheatfield-in-a-box into a big charcoal briquette (can't use that word, because it's not in English!) block. It wouldn't be enough to say "screw you!" to Enron (Portland is not traditionally one of those high sunshine parts of the world, and our house does not really have the roofline to properly handle the solar array, nor does it have enough of a backyard to be able to support a tall tower, but my servers don't eat that much power (we have a plague of wall warts that eat almost as much power as the elderly K7 that runs downbelow, and that's the most power-hungry processor that's running in the house today.) I would probably want to downpower the servers, and possibly even collapse them into one box (the VIA C3/533 is pretty appealing for this sort of repackaging, because it eats about as much power as a 100-lumen compact fluorescent bulb) because then I could have some extra power to run lightbulbs if I needed to.
If I spent my money on a mini power generating system, I'd probably do
- 1 24V solar panel (GE165?) [$719]
- 1 24V Air-X windmill [$539]
- 6 batteries (do I need that many?) [$780]
- 1 morningstar 15A 12/24V charge controller [$155]
- 1 800W inverter [$65]
- mess of cables, connectors, and whatnot to glue the whole shebang together
Okay, it's a bit over US$2000, but it's pretty close, and the little windmill will be good during winter when the pissy poor weather guarantees a steady supply of wind blowing up or down the Willamette valley (and at dusk during summertime, when the wind kicks up for just long enough to get your hopes up before it settles down to being fairly still.) And when I get the summerhouse built, I can pull the whole powerplant and relocate it out to Canada the country.
(It's not what I really want; I really want a 20' head of water and a water turbine, which will give me more megawatts than I know what to do with, but those things start at around US$10,000 and we're not going to have that money available unless I win the lottery.)
Comments
Sealed lead-acid batteries are fairly benign and last quite a long time if you don’t load them too badly. They certainly aren’t my #1 choice for energy storage, but they do have the advantage in that they don’t have moving parts that can fail. As I said, I would prefer to have a water turbine, but those things require water and elevation to work, neither of which are available in my part of Portland.
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Battery capacity is like harddrive space. But… batteries do require protected parking space, maintenance and replacement. Almost all batteries are not enviromentally nice.