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Using Solar

 

The original residence contained two electric water heaters. To conserve energy these were removed and replaced with a solar hot water heating system located centrally in the house. We are in the process of going totally off the grid and have recently installed a 2.8 Kw solar array hooked up to a pair of Xantrex SW5548's and 16 L-16 batteries.

 

As of May 25th,2007  the array has been redone and upgraded. We now have over 5Kw online (30 x 175W panels) and on our first full day of operation (Saturday May 26th) we made 26 KWh of power from the sun, compared to the 13-14 being produced with the original system.

 

If you are interested in the environment but not ready to commit to solar yet I would suggest you read this article :

 

http://http://biz.yahoo.com/hmoney/070530/051807_100033973.html?.v=1&.pf=personal-finance

 

Ideas like not buying or using an SUV for daily commuting or using CFL's can go a long way (we put in CFL's in all inside light fixtures before putting in our solar system and saw a 10% decrease in our electric bill at that time)



Solar Water Heating
Solar water heating is one of the most cost effective applications of solar energy. Our system consists of two AET-40 panels with a 119 galllon water tank and a GL-30 differential controller. The water heater does have a 5500 watt element for use when we encounter a few consecutive cloudy days but the circuit breaker is shut off normally and we have only turned on the circuit breaker a few times after it has been cloudy for several days or we have company taking a lot of showers :-) at the same time that it has been cloudy for more than a day.





Pollution Free Solar Electric Power (PV)

The  house is partially powered by a 2.8 Kwh array consisting of 16 Shell 175 watt panels connected to a Xantrex Power Panel (see picture). This will allow us to power all essential loads during a grid power outage. Our goal is to expand this to a 5 Kwh array which will enable us to power all loads except AC without using the grid. Once we have 5Kwh online we will probably convert to a net metered system and hope to be a net zero energy customer including AC needs.

 

Currently we are due to put another 2Kw (approx) online at the end of May 2007, and have submitted an application for Net-Metering.