And really, 'may or may not have enough' is really a question of expense. Do you or do you not have enough batteries? If you're running out of power at night, the obvious answer is 'no', and you 'need' to increase expense by installing more, and maybe another solar panel or two to charge them.
My main question becomes, why should I bother? I already have power... it is dependable and works all the time and it is, all things considered, cheap...
"What problem are you trying to solve?"
I looked at last month's bill:
I paid $189.23 for electric charges. That is the total amount including the city sales tax, muni franchise fee, etc.
I used 1766 KWh worth of power. My cost per KWh including all charges on the bill is 10.7 cents.
That is an annual rate (it isn't summer yet so the true number is higher) of 21,192 KWH worth of power, for an annual bill of just over $2,200 (if it holds even at that number).
No amount of savings from batteries and solar panels makes any kind of sense.
Sorry but I will never do either - it goes fundamentally against everything I believe in. People should let other people do whatever the fuck they want unless it hurts somebody else.
And you call yourself a liberal... and you claim to hate conservatives...
That is part of it, but the bulk of the money goes to maintenance of the community. We have a park and a pool that are funded by our HOA money (which honestly isn't that much, less than a thousand dollars a year). It provides for a green space, a playground for the kids, we get a nice pond with a fountain in it and a place for families to run and play that is just for our neighborhood.
Can I paint my front door red? Yes, so long as it isn't too bright. Can I paint it brown, black, white? Yes. Can I paint it orange or pink or yellow? No, I can't. And I'm ok with that.
I also can't put in a window AC unit, I can't put in an above ground poor, I can't park an RV in the street in front of my house, I can't hold yard sales every week in my front lawn, etc. And that's ok, because all that stuff is ugly.
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I choose to live here because of these reasons, not in spite of them. I understand that it isn't for everyone and that is fine, I fully support your right to live somewhere that doesn't have a HOA.
To me -it ADDS value to a neighbourhood when every house looks different and unique. Expressing something of the owner's personality. It gives the neighbourhood character. One of the most beautiful suburbs in Cape Town is Bo-kaap just outside CBD. Where EVERY house is a different bright colour. Pinks and blues and yellows and reds - and most houses are several of those. Has this harmed property values ? Hell no ! On the contrary, photographers go there to do photoshoots because it provides such awesome backdrops and landscape photography opportunities.
In that case, the homes are all that way and thus it is "normal".
If all the homes on my street were painted a different color, then yes, it would be fine.
The problem becomes when it is a single home that does it. If you have 20 homes in a row that all more or less look the same, and 1 of them is painted pink, it stands out like a sore thumb.
Either way is fine, but the middle ground doesn't really work. There is a real estate principle called "conformity", and it works the world over.
The irony is that the homes in the neighborhood you describe ARE conforming... they are conforming to being unique and different from each other, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do it. But it isn't the only way.
What, that someone else has a different viewpoint than you do?:)
Perhaps you should look inward to find out why you need to pass so much judgement over others.
The rules for the homes here were known to all before anyone bought a house, and no one was forced to buy a house here. There are homes not THAT far away that do not have such rules, if you don't like them, go buy a house over there.
I don't wish to take away your right to make neighborhoods without such rules, why would you wish to take away my right to make them with such rules?
If I want to die my hair pink I do (and have done) and if I want to paint my house pink - then fuck anybody else's opinion.
I fully support your right to do that... in areas that don't have rules against it...
I don't think EVERY house should be subject to such rules... I think SOME houses should be, and some should not.
There is enough room in this world for me (and those like me) to have homes that all look the same, and for you you have homes that don't.
I specifically picked this place to live because it has a HOA, because you can't do that, because I don't want to see it. You choose otherwise and I fully support your right to do that.
If your AC has 8 tons of capacity, then your house is either gigantic or incredibly inefficient. Normal-sized houses have ACs closer to the 2-3 ton range.
It is indeed "large" in terms of what the average person would consider "normal", but it is sized properly for the space.
It is a 2 story house, the interior space is 24 feet tall with a total square footage of 3,800 and a ground surface area of 2,200 sqft (the upstairs is smaller than downstairs, a lot of it is open to below).
Downstairs has a 5 ton unit, upstairs has a 3 ton unit.
In your case, it's entirely appropriate that a battery to run your system would be huge and expensive compared to a normal house's!
Yes, and that is the problem. You're trying to come up with a crazy expensive system to help me avoid a $300 a month electric bill. That is the target and that is the problem.
$50,000 worth of solar panels and another $25,000 worth of batteries (both that ultimately do require maintenance), all to avoid $300 a month to the power company?
Why? What problem of mine does this solve?
You sound like somebody who buys a 10 MPG Ferrari and then complains he can't afford gas.
I'm not complaining about the cost of gas, or power. My truck gets 12 mpg... do I care? Sure, sort of, not really... if I cared I would have bought something else... Would I *LIKE* it to get better millage? Sure, of course... but it doesn't influence my purchase decision. Having a large vehicle that does everything is simply more important to me than the cost of gas.
Likewise, having a house kept at 74 degrees year round is simply more important to me than the power bill. Power prices could double tomorrow and it would not change my behavior. They could triple and I might think about it. But the changes wouldn't be huge, I'd probably replace all my lights with LEDs (most are currently CFLs), I'd probably replace a few of the south facing windows with something better, and probably toss some insulation in the attic.
So I guess if you put out a carbon tax high enough to triple my power bill, I'd take some small measures to change, but you'd crush the average american's budget in the process. Which is why we aren't going to get a carbon tax and if we do, it will be too small to actually effect change.
Are those same flats in Italy, France, and North Africa also 3,800 sqft with 12 to 24 foot ceilings?
Are they built on clay that prevents the construction of basements (for a reasonable price)?
Are they heated and cooled to the mid 70 degree temp year round, from an outside temp that varies between below freezing to over 100 degrees?
Are they priced per foot anywhere close to the price per foot of our homes?
Do they have the amount of "things" that we have? We have 3 TVs, 5 computers, and a hundred other things plugged into outlets, they all suck power. Even if we turn off the HVAC tomorrow it wouldn't cut more than 50% of our energy use.
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It is very easy to make such statements, but they don't take into account all the various differences between locations, lifestyles, etc.
Now the question becomes, "should we build the homes we do?". Probably not, but that ship has sailed and complaining about it isn't going to fix it.
By the time you've increased the efficiency of your house to the point that solar makes sense to begin with, the answer is "not all that big."
I don't think you are really living in reality when it comes to what is cost effective to do to most homes in America to make them more energy efficient.
I'm not going to spend $50,000 to properly insulate my home, and that is what it probably would cost to do it right. Can it be done? Sure, but that doesn't mean it is going to.
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Your ideas and suggestions are great examples of someone who is coming up with solutions to problems without having to pay for them.
Can we do all these things? Yes, it is technically possible using the technology we have to do all that you are suggesting. I have no doubt about that. But it just isn't going to happen.
Between the cost of solar panels, the cost of the battery, the cost of insulation, new windows, etc. I could easily spend over $100,000 to "solve" this problem you think I have. All to remove a $300 a month electric bill.
That is just nuts and silly. It is a poor use of capital. That money would be much better spent building nuclear power plants and just running the systems we have.
I'm 99% certain you have poor insulation (compared to what anyone who was trying to run their AC off solar power would have), and that's your real problem.
Besides, almost everywhere except the tropics gets cool enough at night that opening windows and running a whole house fan should be able to let people avoid running the AC at night. (And houses in warm areas like that should be designed so that windows can be opened at night, by (for example) having wide enough roof overhangs to keep rain out. If you live in Florida and your house is designed the same way as one in New England, you're Doing It Wrong.)
Where I live, it is often still 90 degrees at night well past midnight in the summer. You simply have to run the AC to keep the house at a reasonable temp. If the house is being kept at 74 degrees and you open the windows and night and turn on a fan, the house will quickly raise in temp beyond a bearable point.
This comes back to, "you're asking people to change their lifestyle", and frankly most people don't want to, they don't feel they need to, and they aren't going to.
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As for the "house in Flordia being the same as New England", people like their homes the way they are, solutions have been found in the form of HVAC, so the houses don't HAVE to be designed differently, we can simply heat and cool them as we want. Telling people they shouldn't do that doesn't actually help nor does it solve anything.
Even if we started building houses differently tomorrow, it would make little difference within our lifetime. It will take over 100 years to replace a large number of homes with something "new", because we don't tear down and replace homes that often.
Those problems are trivially (albeit perhaps not inexpensively) solved by simply specifying a big enough battery.
Making a battery larger doesn't always increase the amperage of the output. It can, depending on the design, but that gets very expensive. Batteries can store a lot of power, but how much peak output can they provide? 45 amps is a LOT of power for a battery for your home, yet that only runs three circuits and it doesn't run the HVAC. A 200 amp output battery would, but the size and cost would be crazy.
Waving away the problem by saying "cost is the only concern" misses the point that "cost" is indeed a huge concern. And of course, size is an issue, many homes are smaller, where are you going to put these batteries for townhomes, condos, apartments, etc.?
That is a conversation that no one seems to be having, not here on Slashdot or anywhere else (in the US at least).
Would I be open to changing the building codes going forward? Sure, that is a conversation worth having.
But it doesn't do anything about the 100 million homes already built. We aren't going to tear them all down, so how do we deal with the situation as it exists?
We need power, lots of power, and we need to do it cleanly and reasonably cheaply. Solar and wind cannot provide base load, they are nice supplements, but that's it. Can you imagine a system of solar and wind that DOES provide base load? Yes, you can. Between stored power, distributed power (across long distances even), and a "smart grid" with "smart homes", you probably could design a system from scratch that works with solar and wind only.
But that isn't reality, it isn't what we have, and we aren't going to go there within our lifetimes. We just... aren't...
So in terms of what we have, there are really three sources of power that can provide, in reality, base load for a billion people today in the world. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Which of those three would you prefer to have, if they are your only choices?
But that just points out a problem, what is the solution? Telling me to move doesn't solve anything, someone else would just move here. Rebuilding or redesigning the house is too expensive, and we aren't going to tear down half of the houses in the country.
The reality is that we have what we have in terms of homes, that isn't going to change within our lifetime. So now we have to figure out how to provide the power required to run these houses.
I vote for nuclear, it is the only replacement for coal and natural gas that can provide base load for billions of people. The waste can be contained if we can get over our political issues, the waste from coal and natural gas cannot be contained, it goes into the air.
1. The upper windows in the great room don't open, and I couldn't reach them even if they did. I suppose I could replace them with opening windows run by remote control, but that would be expensive.
2. When the temp is in the 80's, it is starting to get humid. One of the benefits of running the AC isn't just the reduction in temp of the air, it is the humidification of the air. 82 degrees and 10% humidity is not the same as 82 degrees and 35% humidity in terms of "feel".
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Frankly I think it is sad that our houses aren't "smart" and aren't "power" in the way our cars are. I think if homes had power windows more people would use them, but going around and opening and closing 16 windows downstairs and 12 windows upstairs. It isn't the "end of the world" to do it by hand, but in truth, it is easier to just leave the HVAC running.
At the end of the day, the power bill is not high enough to motivate me to change that.
That was some interesting reading, I had not seen that before, so thank you...
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That being said, those solutions wouldn't work here, they require building new homes and we simply aren't going to replace all our houses. They also require space to work, basements and room underground (our homes are built on clay, we don't have basements, it would cost too much).
HVAC also does more than just cool the air, it is called "air conditioning" for a reason, it also dehumidifies the air. It also works in sizes and spaces the above system would not.
It is a good example of how someone sees an idea and says "oh, see, it could work, SOMEONE SOMEWHERE DID IT", without considering how you'd make it work for apartments, condos, townhomes, houses built near the ocean, houses build in the mountains, etc.
And then there is cost... a small HVAC system is actually pretty cheap, what does the above system cost? Money is everything (even if you don't want it to be).
I suspect you underestimate the size required of that "small battery" to provide the power a household uses for a few days.
I suspect you underestimate the size of backup generator that would be required for the same thing.
Both would require a capital investment, both would take up space that may not exist in each home, and both create their own pollution in many ways.
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It is easy to type it on the Internet when you don't have to do it or deal with it, but it is a real problem and no one has an actual real world solution for it.
I suspect that the Egyptians and so forth also know a thing or two about keeping buildings cool in hot places without having to run a compressor.
Yes, but they don't get it down to 74 degrees without one either.:)
Seriously maybe think about redesigning your dwelling to be passively/naturally cool
That would cost a lot of money, and there are limits to what we can do anyway, we live in a nice area and the Homeowners Associations are rather strict as to what you can and cannot do. It can be annoying, but it protects the value of the home against the idiot who would paint their house pink.
At the end of the day, my monthly electric bill is about $300. I would have to spend a lot of money to reduce it by much more than $100 or so per month (computers and other electronics use what they use). $100 is simply not a lot of money to me each month and I'm not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to save a hundred bucks a month.
But really you need to address your flagrant overuse of electricity.
What makes you think we overuse electricity?
My home is 3,800 sqft (about 350 sqm). 5 people live here and I work from home. Between the HVAC, computers, and other electronic devices plugged in, we also have very tall ceilings which don't help (our great room/family room has 24' ceilings with floor to ceiling windows).
I have made some effort to not waste power, most of our bulbs are replaced with CFL, our computers are set to go to sleep when not being used, etc. We don't leave lights on, we close the blinds during the day in the summer to block out some of the sun's heat, etc.
It's worth noting that installing renewable energy generating kit on your roof will increase the value of your house. So even if you decide to leave before you've paid off the costs of the installation you should be able to recoup all your investment by increasing the sale price of the house.
The market doesn't work that way here... It does raise the value of your home, but not by that much... You might get 1/3 of the cost of the system back, give or take...
In the city I live in, we have about 250,000 people... Only about 100 homes have installed solar... It is just not a normal thing to do here...
Part of the challenge I suspect is that if you're in the UK, you probably pay more than 11 cents per kWh, if we had to pay higher rates, more people would be interested.
Well the average uk household uses 4.6 MWh/year so yeah, you use 5 times what I'm used to having to provide. I suppose that's the price of living in desert and not acclimatising your body to the heat.
It used to be about 20% higher, before we replaced our old single stage 13 SEER HVAC with a new dual stage 16 SEER HVAC.:)
We could probably cut another 10-15% off that by replacing our windows and re-insulating our attic.
As for adjusting to the heat, we don't live in a desert, I live in the Dallas, TX area, we get plenty of rain, but August tends to stay around 100 degrees with peaks in the 104 range (40C to those not on a backwards unit system)
you'll just have to get a bigger battery to reduce the "range anxiety" type issue
Of course there is more to it than the size of the battery, there is how much amperage the battery can put out at once.
What type of battery is going to run my AC in the summer? A total of 8 tons of cooling, plus the rest of the house?
I suspect that the cost of such a battery would be cost prohibitive.
It is hard enough to get people to replace their 10-15 year old 13 SEER AC units, when the payback is clear on those, these pie-in-the-sky dreams of batteries and solar on houses are just nuts.
Slashdot Mirror
And really, 'may or may not have enough' is really a question of expense. Do you or do you not have enough batteries? If you're running out of power at night, the obvious answer is 'no', and you 'need' to increase expense by installing more, and maybe another solar panel or two to charge them.
My main question becomes, why should I bother? I already have power... it is dependable and works all the time and it is, all things considered, cheap...
"What problem are you trying to solve?"
I looked at last month's bill:
I paid $189.23 for electric charges. That is the total amount including the city sales tax, muni franchise fee, etc.
I used 1766 KWh worth of power. My cost per KWh including all charges on the bill is 10.7 cents.
That is an annual rate (it isn't summer yet so the true number is higher) of 21,192 KWH worth of power, for an annual bill of just over $2,200 (if it holds even at that number).
No amount of savings from batteries and solar panels makes any kind of sense.
Actually no, they generally don't...
Large base load plants generally run at 100% all the time, it is expensive to run them any other way.
Smaller gas turbines are used to make up the peak demand load.
Sorry but I will never do either - it goes fundamentally against everything I believe in. People should let other people do whatever the fuck they want unless it hurts somebody else.
And you call yourself a liberal... and you claim to hate conservatives...
The irony is so thick...
You do what you want with your house, your body and your life and STFU about what anybody else does unless it actually impacts on your rights.
Ahh, but there is where we disagree...
I think what you do with your house DOES impact me, thus I get a say...
Well, to be clear, what you do with your house that is near mine does... what you do with your house in South Africa? Not in the least...
And that is fine, but do the other 19 homeowners get a day?
What could be more democratic than the 19 voting to tell the 20th that he can't paint it pink?
At the end of the day, what he does effects everyone near him, so it is reasonable and fair to have such rules if the majority want them.
You don't have to like it, but you should respect it.
IHMO :)
The HOA does much more than "tell us what to do".
That is part of it, but the bulk of the money goes to maintenance of the community. We have a park and a pool that are funded by our HOA money (which honestly isn't that much, less than a thousand dollars a year). It provides for a green space, a playground for the kids, we get a nice pond with a fountain in it and a place for families to run and play that is just for our neighborhood.
Can I paint my front door red? Yes, so long as it isn't too bright. Can I paint it brown, black, white? Yes. Can I paint it orange or pink or yellow? No, I can't. And I'm ok with that.
I also can't put in a window AC unit, I can't put in an above ground poor, I can't park an RV in the street in front of my house, I can't hold yard sales every week in my front lawn, etc. And that's ok, because all that stuff is ugly.
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I choose to live here because of these reasons, not in spite of them. I understand that it isn't for everyone and that is fine, I fully support your right to live somewhere that doesn't have a HOA.
To me -it ADDS value to a neighbourhood when every house looks different and unique. Expressing something of the owner's personality. It gives the neighbourhood character.
One of the most beautiful suburbs in Cape Town is Bo-kaap just outside CBD. Where EVERY house is a different bright colour. Pinks and blues and yellows and reds - and most houses are several of those.
Has this harmed property values ? Hell no ! On the contrary, photographers go there to do photoshoots because it provides such awesome backdrops and landscape photography opportunities.
In that case, the homes are all that way and thus it is "normal".
If all the homes on my street were painted a different color, then yes, it would be fine.
The problem becomes when it is a single home that does it. If you have 20 homes in a row that all more or less look the same, and 1 of them is painted pink, it stands out like a sore thumb.
Either way is fine, but the middle ground doesn't really work. There is a real estate principle called "conformity", and it works the world over.
The irony is that the homes in the neighborhood you describe ARE conforming... they are conforming to being unique and different from each other, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do it. But it isn't the only way.
Now that sort of thinking pisses me off.
What, that someone else has a different viewpoint than you do? :)
Perhaps you should look inward to find out why you need to pass so much judgement over others.
The rules for the homes here were known to all before anyone bought a house, and no one was forced to buy a house here. There are homes not THAT far away that do not have such rules, if you don't like them, go buy a house over there.
I don't wish to take away your right to make neighborhoods without such rules, why would you wish to take away my right to make them with such rules?
If I want to die my hair pink I do (and have done) and if I want to paint my house pink - then fuck anybody else's opinion.
I fully support your right to do that... in areas that don't have rules against it...
I don't think EVERY house should be subject to such rules... I think SOME houses should be, and some should not.
There is enough room in this world for me (and those like me) to have homes that all look the same, and for you you have homes that don't.
I specifically picked this place to live because it has a HOA, because you can't do that, because I don't want to see it. You choose otherwise and I fully support your right to do that.
If your AC has 8 tons of capacity, then your house is either gigantic or incredibly inefficient. Normal-sized houses have ACs closer to the 2-3 ton range.
It is indeed "large" in terms of what the average person would consider "normal", but it is sized properly for the space.
It is a 2 story house, the interior space is 24 feet tall with a total square footage of 3,800 and a ground surface area of 2,200 sqft (the upstairs is smaller than downstairs, a lot of it is open to below).
Downstairs has a 5 ton unit, upstairs has a 3 ton unit.
In your case, it's entirely appropriate that a battery to run your system would be huge and expensive compared to a normal house's!
Yes, and that is the problem. You're trying to come up with a crazy expensive system to help me avoid a $300 a month electric bill. That is the target and that is the problem.
$50,000 worth of solar panels and another $25,000 worth of batteries (both that ultimately do require maintenance), all to avoid $300 a month to the power company?
Why? What problem of mine does this solve?
You sound like somebody who buys a 10 MPG Ferrari and then complains he can't afford gas.
I'm not complaining about the cost of gas, or power. My truck gets 12 mpg... do I care? Sure, sort of, not really... if I cared I would have bought something else... Would I *LIKE* it to get better millage? Sure, of course... but it doesn't influence my purchase decision. Having a large vehicle that does everything is simply more important to me than the cost of gas.
Likewise, having a house kept at 74 degrees year round is simply more important to me than the power bill. Power prices could double tomorrow and it would not change my behavior. They could triple and I might think about it. But the changes wouldn't be huge, I'd probably replace all my lights with LEDs (most are currently CFLs), I'd probably replace a few of the south facing windows with something better, and probably toss some insulation in the attic.
So I guess if you put out a carbon tax high enough to triple my power bill, I'd take some small measures to change, but you'd crush the average american's budget in the process. Which is why we aren't going to get a carbon tax and if we do, it will be too small to actually effect change.
Are those same flats in Italy, France, and North Africa also 3,800 sqft with 12 to 24 foot ceilings?
Are they built on clay that prevents the construction of basements (for a reasonable price)?
Are they heated and cooled to the mid 70 degree temp year round, from an outside temp that varies between below freezing to over 100 degrees?
Are they priced per foot anywhere close to the price per foot of our homes?
Do they have the amount of "things" that we have? We have 3 TVs, 5 computers, and a hundred other things plugged into outlets, they all suck power. Even if we turn off the HVAC tomorrow it wouldn't cut more than 50% of our energy use.
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It is very easy to make such statements, but they don't take into account all the various differences between locations, lifestyles, etc.
Now the question becomes, "should we build the homes we do?". Probably not, but that ship has sailed and complaining about it isn't going to fix it.
By the time you've increased the efficiency of your house to the point that solar makes sense to begin with, the answer is "not all that big."
I don't think you are really living in reality when it comes to what is cost effective to do to most homes in America to make them more energy efficient.
I'm not going to spend $50,000 to properly insulate my home, and that is what it probably would cost to do it right. Can it be done? Sure, but that doesn't mean it is going to.
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Your ideas and suggestions are great examples of someone who is coming up with solutions to problems without having to pay for them.
Can we do all these things? Yes, it is technically possible using the technology we have to do all that you are suggesting. I have no doubt about that. But it just isn't going to happen.
Between the cost of solar panels, the cost of the battery, the cost of insulation, new windows, etc. I could easily spend over $100,000 to "solve" this problem you think I have. All to remove a $300 a month electric bill.
That is just nuts and silly. It is a poor use of capital. That money would be much better spent building nuclear power plants and just running the systems we have.
I'm 99% certain you have poor insulation (compared to what anyone who was trying to run their AC off solar power would have), and that's your real problem.
Besides, almost everywhere except the tropics gets cool enough at night that opening windows and running a whole house fan should be able to let people avoid running the AC at night. (And houses in warm areas like that should be designed so that windows can be opened at night, by (for example) having wide enough roof overhangs to keep rain out. If you live in Florida and your house is designed the same way as one in New England, you're Doing It Wrong.)
Where I live, it is often still 90 degrees at night well past midnight in the summer. You simply have to run the AC to keep the house at a reasonable temp. If the house is being kept at 74 degrees and you open the windows and night and turn on a fan, the house will quickly raise in temp beyond a bearable point.
This comes back to, "you're asking people to change their lifestyle", and frankly most people don't want to, they don't feel they need to, and they aren't going to.
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As for the "house in Flordia being the same as New England", people like their homes the way they are, solutions have been found in the form of HVAC, so the houses don't HAVE to be designed differently, we can simply heat and cool them as we want. Telling people they shouldn't do that doesn't actually help nor does it solve anything.
Even if we started building houses differently tomorrow, it would make little difference within our lifetime. It will take over 100 years to replace a large number of homes with something "new", because we don't tear down and replace homes that often.
Those problems are trivially (albeit perhaps not inexpensively) solved by simply specifying a big enough battery.
Making a battery larger doesn't always increase the amperage of the output. It can, depending on the design, but that gets very expensive. Batteries can store a lot of power, but how much peak output can they provide? 45 amps is a LOT of power for a battery for your home, yet that only runs three circuits and it doesn't run the HVAC. A 200 amp output battery would, but the size and cost would be crazy.
Waving away the problem by saying "cost is the only concern" misses the point that "cost" is indeed a huge concern. And of course, size is an issue, many homes are smaller, where are you going to put these batteries for townhomes, condos, apartments, etc.?
That is a conversation that no one seems to be having, not here on Slashdot or anywhere else (in the US at least).
Would I be open to changing the building codes going forward? Sure, that is a conversation worth having.
But it doesn't do anything about the 100 million homes already built. We aren't going to tear them all down, so how do we deal with the situation as it exists?
We need power, lots of power, and we need to do it cleanly and reasonably cheaply. Solar and wind cannot provide base load, they are nice supplements, but that's it. Can you imagine a system of solar and wind that DOES provide base load? Yes, you can. Between stored power, distributed power (across long distances even), and a "smart grid" with "smart homes", you probably could design a system from scratch that works with solar and wind only.
But that isn't reality, it isn't what we have, and we aren't going to go there within our lifetimes. We just... aren't...
So in terms of what we have, there are really three sources of power that can provide, in reality, base load for a billion people today in the world. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Which of those three would you prefer to have, if they are your only choices?
You may well be right about that...
But that just points out a problem, what is the solution? Telling me to move doesn't solve anything, someone else would just move here. Rebuilding or redesigning the house is too expensive, and we aren't going to tear down half of the houses in the country.
The reality is that we have what we have in terms of homes, that isn't going to change within our lifetime. So now we have to figure out how to provide the power required to run these houses.
I vote for nuclear, it is the only replacement for coal and natural gas that can provide base load for billions of people. The waste can be contained if we can get over our political issues, the waste from coal and natural gas cannot be contained, it goes into the air.
That isn't a bad idea, except for a few things...
1. The upper windows in the great room don't open, and I couldn't reach them even if they did. I suppose I could replace them with opening windows run by remote control, but that would be expensive.
2. When the temp is in the 80's, it is starting to get humid. One of the benefits of running the AC isn't just the reduction in temp of the air, it is the humidification of the air. 82 degrees and 10% humidity is not the same as 82 degrees and 35% humidity in terms of "feel".
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Frankly I think it is sad that our houses aren't "smart" and aren't "power" in the way our cars are. I think if homes had power windows more people would use them, but going around and opening and closing 16 windows downstairs and 12 windows upstairs. It isn't the "end of the world" to do it by hand, but in truth, it is easier to just leave the HVAC running.
At the end of the day, the power bill is not high enough to motivate me to change that.
That was some interesting reading, I had not seen that before, so thank you...
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That being said, those solutions wouldn't work here, they require building new homes and we simply aren't going to replace all our houses. They also require space to work, basements and room underground (our homes are built on clay, we don't have basements, it would cost too much).
HVAC also does more than just cool the air, it is called "air conditioning" for a reason, it also dehumidifies the air. It also works in sizes and spaces the above system would not.
It is a good example of how someone sees an idea and says "oh, see, it could work, SOMEONE SOMEWHERE DID IT", without considering how you'd make it work for apartments, condos, townhomes, houses built near the ocean, houses build in the mountains, etc.
And then there is cost... a small HVAC system is actually pretty cheap, what does the above system cost? Money is everything (even if you don't want it to be).
Yes, that is all true... but that is human nature, we are not, as a general rule, as "smart" as we all think we are...
I suspect you underestimate the size required of that "small battery" to provide the power a household uses for a few days.
I suspect you underestimate the size of backup generator that would be required for the same thing.
Both would require a capital investment, both would take up space that may not exist in each home, and both create their own pollution in many ways.
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It is easy to type it on the Internet when you don't have to do it or deal with it, but it is a real problem and no one has an actual real world solution for it.
I suspect that the Egyptians and so forth also know a thing or two about keeping buildings cool in hot places without having to run a compressor.
Yes, but they don't get it down to 74 degrees without one either. :)
Seriously maybe think about redesigning your dwelling to be passively/naturally cool
That would cost a lot of money, and there are limits to what we can do anyway, we live in a nice area and the Homeowners Associations are rather strict as to what you can and cannot do. It can be annoying, but it protects the value of the home against the idiot who would paint their house pink.
At the end of the day, my monthly electric bill is about $300. I would have to spend a lot of money to reduce it by much more than $100 or so per month (computers and other electronics use what they use). $100 is simply not a lot of money to me each month and I'm not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to save a hundred bucks a month.
But really you need to address your flagrant overuse of electricity.
What makes you think we overuse electricity?
My home is 3,800 sqft (about 350 sqm). 5 people live here and I work from home. Between the HVAC, computers, and other electronic devices plugged in, we also have very tall ceilings which don't help (our great room/family room has 24' ceilings with floor to ceiling windows).
I have made some effort to not waste power, most of our bulbs are replaced with CFL, our computers are set to go to sleep when not being used, etc. We don't leave lights on, we close the blinds during the day in the summer to block out some of the sun's heat, etc.
We just use a lot of power.
It's worth noting that installing renewable energy generating kit on your roof will increase the value of your house. So even if you decide to leave before you've paid off the costs of the installation you should be able to recoup all your investment by increasing the sale price of the house.
The market doesn't work that way here... It does raise the value of your home, but not by that much... You might get 1/3 of the cost of the system back, give or take...
In the city I live in, we have about 250,000 people... Only about 100 homes have installed solar... It is just not a normal thing to do here...
Part of the challenge I suspect is that if you're in the UK, you probably pay more than 11 cents per kWh, if we had to pay higher rates, more people would be interested.
Well the average uk household uses 4.6 MWh/year so yeah, you use 5 times what I'm used to having to provide. I suppose that's the price of living in desert and not acclimatising your body to the heat.
It used to be about 20% higher, before we replaced our old single stage 13 SEER HVAC with a new dual stage 16 SEER HVAC. :)
We could probably cut another 10-15% off that by replacing our windows and re-insulating our attic.
As for adjusting to the heat, we don't live in a desert, I live in the Dallas, TX area, we get plenty of rain, but August tends to stay around 100 degrees with peaks in the 104 range (40C to those not on a backwards unit system)
you'll just have to get a bigger battery to reduce the "range anxiety" type issue
Of course there is more to it than the size of the battery, there is how much amperage the battery can put out at once.
What type of battery is going to run my AC in the summer? A total of 8 tons of cooling, plus the rest of the house?
I suspect that the cost of such a battery would be cost prohibitive.
It is hard enough to get people to replace their 10-15 year old 13 SEER AC units, when the payback is clear on those, these pie-in-the-sky dreams of batteries and solar on houses are just nuts.
Who is going to pay for all this?