Your more sustainable home
For those in Australia who own their own homes:
The Federal Government is giving out rebates for environmentally responsibly initiatives in the home. Even though Rudd's government is wussing out on their promises before the election, they are still a lot better than Howard's lot.
If you don't have effective insulation:You can get $1,600 off the ( Read more... )
The Federal Government is giving out rebates for environmentally responsibly initiatives in the home. Even though Rudd's government is wussing out on their promises before the election, they are still a lot better than Howard's lot.
If you don't have effective insulation:You can get $1,600 off the ( Read more... )
So if you use 1500kWh of electricity in a quarter, and 1000kWh is generated in a quarter from your solar panels, then you end up only having to pay for 500kWh worth from the electricity company.
If you use 1500kWh of electricity in a quarter, and 1800kWh is generated in a quarter from your solar panels, then you will receive payment from the electricity company for 300kWh worth.
Essentially when you are on the grid, you are running your own mini power station that adds into the grid.
If you are off the grid, then if it would cost more than $30,000 to connect to the grid, then you qualify for the $200,000 rebate for renewable energy. However there wouldn't be many places in Victoria that would qualify for that. NT, yes! But if you want to live somewhere where it would just cost a bit more than you'd wanna pay to connect up to the main grid, then you can totally create your own mini power station. I've seen a couple of places that have - very inspiring. A combination of solar, wind, and maybe hydro is all for the good, plus a really huge bank of batteries to get you through the down times. And almost everyone on those systems will have a back-up diesel generator just in case.
Suzi is a good person to talk to, she's got all these magazines that show you how to do this stuff!
It's even better if you can get everything to run on 12V as solar panels etc will generate, because you lose quite a bit of electricity transforming everything up to 230/240V that grid households use. I've seen plans for transforming fridges and washing machines to 12V. And you can also use the old-fashioned version of fridges which is wet cloth draped over a frame (or something, bit more involved than that), uses evaporative cooling, might be good for things that just need to stay a bit cooler. I've seen gas fridges for sale, and there is a market in Australia for them. There are also lots of very efficient 12V fridges that people use in the car/caravan, sometimes fishing places have them too. The Quakers in the US are good for supplying non-electricity versions of household items, and you can at least browse their sites for ideas. I can't remember addresses, sorry!
Laptops would be much better off the grid. It's good off the grid to have a surge protector, and I think laptops are less susceptible to power fluctuations, plus they use less. CPAP no worries, as the battery bank would keep it running.
Internet - if you can't get grid power, you might not be near telephone lines, or you could get one and not the other. Modems/routers use very little electricity, and phone lines carry their own residual voltage, they don't need grid power. Or you could get satellite internet but I think that's expensive.
Microwave - eh, I don't think you could transform one down to 12V. They use quite a bit of electricity but they aren't on for long. If you have most of your household items on 12V you can always get an inverter that transforms 12V up to 240V (you know, like the one I had at Wilson's Prom but more expensive so it can handle the high wattage of a microwave), to run certain items.
You can make sure that your mini power station issues a warning if you are about to run out of power, so you can switch over to diesel, or at least shut everything off, so that the voltage doesn't drop and you experience a "brown-out" - which can screw with some appliances. On the Really Hot Horror Bushfire Day, my parents' house experienced a brown-out, and things worked really oddly, so we turned most things off except incandescent lights, fans, and my laptop which coped with 110V+.
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