Schreiner’s Media Landscape

Here as promised are results for the first year of our 2kWh solar array, also known as Solarius Precarious because of its tumultuous birth and exhilarating first year of life. If you’re interested in seeing Solarius’ creation, please watch my video. When I think back to one year ago, I still get emotional. How can a person be more attached to a machine than a “living thing?” This is how.

We produced and used more solar power than grid power. We still use grid power through our Gridpoint appliance which regulates how much of each you’re using. The green bar (left) is solar and blue (right) is grid. It will be a lot more this coming year because we know what we’re doing now. As the second chart shows, I actually cut off our connection to the grid entirely by throwing a switch in July. I wanted to see if we could run the entire house and studio off the panels- which is what happened. But the indicators for that period are down as a result because the solar we produced was being used so it doesn’t show up as production. The rest of the year’s production is fairly typical though October and November appear to be unusually strong because it was unusually sunny.

There are other anomolies I won’t go into that affected the results. I was surprised that our consumption stayed fairly consistent despite new equipment in my studio and subsequent power usage. We offset this by adding power strips to certain devices that allowed us to shut them off entirely instead of them running on “hot standby” as many of them do. Conservation must be a component of any energy conservation program. You just can’t put up solar panels and start using more power and expect to keep up.

Despite my home studio and all its electronic implements, lights and air conditioning were the major users of power. That’s easily detectable by looking at the June-August hot months and the December-March dark months. Spring and autumn are clearly the best months for a grid-tied solar power system. Using an evaporative (swamp) cooler also saves a lot of power over a standard air conditioner. August was surprising in that it was very hot (100s) and consumption was high but the panels carried the bulk of the load.

The system taught me how much power each thing in the house and studio use. From there, it was easy to find ways to conserve use of those items and save power and money. Other conservation measures we learned include running the dishwasher, washer-dryer and other power-sucking appliances during the day when we weren’t taking power from the grid but from the panels. We replaced old bulbs with CFLs. That helped hold down consumption a lot.

My next step is to calculate how much money we saved over the past year. But because Rocky Mountain Power, the most incompetent utility I’ve ever encountered, still estimates our bills and has botched every net metering and other interfacing task since Day One, I’m not sure how accurate a measurement I’ll get. I know our bills and usage are lower but certainly no thanks to them. Which is the major temptation of having a solar array like ours: just throwing the inverter switch and leaving the power company in the dark. It’s a goal, a dream. Someday, somehow, somewhere.