Game change, name change

Original blog header photo. This name no longer accurately describes our "odyssey" 

Interim blog header photo

As you can see from the partially completed new header there are some changes to talk about. All exuberant plans need to be reviewed and revised every so often. Ours are no exception.

If this turtle isn't careful, he will fall too!

When we first stumbled upon the trillium-covered terrain we now know as Turtle Falls our initial thoughts were to build a cottage in the truest sense of the word. More a cabin really...only seasonal use was the idea...a place to escape the crazy-making city and relax by the water's edge with a good book and a great margarita, all while soaking up a little bit of sunshine. Aaah...life at its simple best.

Then our simple little idea grew. Our first revision incorporated the idea of passive solar design. What a great concept, using the sun to heat your cabin for free. Then came the idea to go solar and get off the grid. And I must add somewhere in here that the cottage plan has now morphed into an all-season home. Lots of dreaming and studying ensued. The real benefit from all of that effort was becoming much more energy efficient humans as we practiced for the eventual living in an off grid home. We ridded our house of phantom power consumption, got our electricity bill down to a reasonable monthly dollar amount, and became aware of the incredible opportunity we all have with the renewable energy sources available to us.

Just when we thought we were getting close to finalizing our want list for our new "retirement home" by the lake Passive House hits us square in the face. Never heard of it before. More studying ensued. Result of all the studying...must build Passive House! With the efficiency that is inherent in a passive house it only seemed logical to build this kind of house for our off grid odyssey. Full speed ahead with plans, architect on board, passive house planners on board, contractor on board.

But something still doesn't seem right. I have many sleepless nights wondering how I will coax Ras into complying with the "minimize then energize" mindset necessary to live in an off grid house. She did say, after all the study and discussion of energy efficiency and solar and off grid stuff, "maybe we can have a wine fridge in the new house!" I chalk that up to her overwhelming exuberance and a momentary lapse into rose-coloured glasses land. My reply: "21 years we've survived without a wine fridge and you want to put one in the off grid house?" Off came her rose-coloured glasses. I still chuckle about that to this day.

This many solar panels the budget does not afford!

The thought of the football-field-sized solar array keeps dancing in my head! I keep wondering how to power my woodworking shop on those days...or weeks...when the sun doesn't shine. The fact that we will run over our initially targeted budget makes for the very possible reality that I will be building the kitchen and pantry cabinets. One needs a shop with power tools to do that in a timely fashion. Large woodworking tools need large amounts of electricity to run. Only with a football-field-sized solar array would this be possible. And for this, the budget certainly does not allow.

What to do? What to do? What about net metering?

Net metering seems to satisfy all our needs - power the house from the grid, produce enough electricity with our solar array to send back to the grid and therefore offset our electricity usage/bill while still having a battery back-up for those days when the grid goes down. We still have incentive to keep our consumption low to keep the size of the solar array as small as possible (hence no football field...) and we are still self sufficient in the event of a power outage. I've never been a fan of the micro-fit idea purely from the standpoint that if the power goes out you're still sitting in the dark, even with all those solar panels up on the roof. The monthly check is a nice idea but sitting in the dark...not so nice. Net metering is looking real good to us...even without the rose coloured glasses.

So this is where I am stuck at the moment. I started this blog when the plan was in its infancy and came up with the goofy name of Ohm Free: Our Off Grid Odyssey. The name reflected our goals at that time to be more energy efficient and self sufficient. Many revisions later finds us on a slightly different path and now the blog name needs a revision as well. We are still striving to be as energy efficient as possible, as well as self sufficient. We're just going to come at it from a different perspective...one that suits our lifestyle a little better. The ohms might still be free but only after we've received our credit from the hydro utility for the energy we produce. The "off grid" got revised right out of the plan. The odyssey? Oh...it still remains!

With this game change I now need a blog name change. I got as far as sketching out a little scene for the header but I'm stuck for a new name at the moment. I'm still working on it but no luck yet. I seriously need your help.  This is all I've got and, quite honestly, they're pitiful!
Passive House Casa Tortuga...blah
Turtle Falls Tales...nah
Ras & Mimi's Big Building Adventure...not
Net Metering Nerds...hmmm
Musings of an Energy Nerd...taken
Passive House For (By) Dummies...possible...

Got any suggestions? Sure could use the help! Please jot your thoughts down in the comment box. Hopefully, by the next post I will have a new name and a completed header...with your assistance.

Ciao for now!
Mimi

Incandescent vs. CFL vs. LED

I'm going to let my inner geek shine brightly in this post. Some would say, And how is this different than any other day? I might be inclined to agree. Ok...I confess...I am a geek!  Let me tell you why I bring this to light.

As I mentioned in the last post, we have our house in the city, Casa Smalla, up for sale. The Open House is something we all know and understand about this process. So while we were enjoying the beautiful long weekend at a friend's cottage in Georgian Bay, the real estate agent was enjoying some of the weekend weather at our house, two days in a row. Poor fella. You're wondering where I'm going with this, I can feel it.

To prepare Casa Smalla for the 2-hour open house, our agent turns on all the lights in the house and opens the big folding door that looks out over the garden. Then he's ready to handle the onslaught of tire kickers.

Did I mention that the agent turns on all the lights in the house?

So here's where I get my geek on. Burlington Hydro has a Time-of-Use (TOU) website that customers can go to to see when and how much electricity they are using. All very useful to help manage the new higher electricity prices and times, if you care about that kind of thing. I wouldn't have cared about all this 2 years ago. I would have just ranted about the outrageous amounts of electricity this little house (or maybe its occupants?) consumed and left it at that. But since the most important thing about living in an off-grid house is minimizing electricity usage we are now in the training stage of minimizing. Hence my obsession with the kilowatt, or rather killing-a-watt.

Approx. 0.2 kWh hourly to run the things that are always on, such as a fridge.
Usage jumps to 3 kWh hourly when lots of lights are on...yikes!

A quick look at the bar chart from the Burlington Hydro TOU site makes it very obvious how much electricity just the lighting in our house uses. It's also very easy to tell that the real estate agent was, in fact at our house on Sunday with every light in the house on, while we were soaking up the sun in Georgian Bay. That's the only explanation for the huge spike you see in the chart...all the lights being on. Who knew? I was a little shocked to see such a crazy exaggerated chart pattern. 

4 incandescents use more energy in 1 hour than 8 CFLs or 6 LEDs.
All 3 rooms have a similar level of brightness even though the number
of bulbs varies. The hour the LEDs were on barely even registered
any extra electricity usage.

Sleepless nights for me can lead to some odd early morning experiments. So my latest sleepless night was when I got this weird idea to show the difference in electricity usage each type of light bulb causes. By turning a different room's lights on, each for 1-hour over the 3-hour time frame, I could show that all the hype about changing our light bulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescent (CFL) or LED is, in fact, a worthy exercise. The second chart shows the extra hourly electricity usage, beginning with the spike at 4am, of a room that has four 75 watt pot lights. At 5am the 75's were shut off and a room with eight 13 watt CFL pot lights was illuminated. At 6am, the 13's were shut off and a room with six 4 watt LED pot lights was illuminated for one hour. I warned you I was getting my geek on for this post! At this point I'm pretty sure I only have two readers still with me and the rest...well, your eyes have glazed over, haven't they? So a shout out to you, Diane G, and you, Tina L, for sticking with me to the end of this post. You're the only two I can think of that would find this as oddly intriguing as I do.

Why am I telling you this, you ask? I had to write about something while I wait for the composting toilet to show up! Without that, I cannot finish building the outhouse and therefore I have nothing new to report. And I must write! Anyway...my point - light bulbs do indeed make a big difference and I thought you'd like to know just how much. Incandescent lighting can be the single biggest user of energy, apart from clothes dryers and air conditioning, in your home depending on how many and how long said lighting remains on in your home on a daily basis. The rooms we use the most are the rooms with the CFLs and the LEDs. That room with the 75w incandescents...we hardly ever use but apparently the real estate agent does! Note to self: change all remaining incandescents to at least CFLs, if for no other reason than open houses!

Conclusion (I can hear the cheering now), LEDs, although they cost more per bulb, last way longer than either CFLs or incandescents. LEDs use way less electricity than the others as well. And LEDs are less fragile and less harmful to the environment. Here is a chart that summarizes everything you ever wanted to know about light bulb comparison. And, no, I have not taken a sales position with an LED lighting company! Just doing my part to help the environment, and maybe your electricity bill.

Cheers from your friendly LED (Lame Energy Dork)
Mimi

Giving phantom load the boot

Now that summer is over, our focus will turn from outdoor projects to the larger task of choosing the type of house we want to build and sizing a renewable energy system for it. Our goal is to build an off grid home with all the modern conveniences we have grown accustomed to over the years. The thought of this was a bit daunting at first having read that the typical off grid home runs on the same amount of electricity per day as the typical clothes dryer uses to dry one full load of towels. Having a look at our hydro bill, I thought it can't be done. If this little house we live in averages between 17 kWh/day in the summer to 39 kWh/day in the winter, there's no way we will ever reach our goal to have a self-sufficient renewable energy home.

A little research and a little knowledge can go a long way in taming fear. Doing more with less is the driving force behind living off-the-grid. Doing more with less does not mean doing without; it means being more efficient. A few months ago I started the exercise of determining the amount of energy each electricity-sucking item in our house consumes and where we could trim some excesses. I was nicely shocked to find out how easy it was to reduce 6,336 watts or 6.3 kWh per day without reducing the quality of our lives or adding extra workloads. Our last hydro bill, compared to the same billing period from last year, showed a reduction of 399 kWh, bringing our summertime daily average to just over 11.5 kWh/day.

The following chart lists what I changed and how many watts were saved each day. The yellow high-lighted items are strictly phantom loads that were reduced simply by switching things off or plugging into power bars that can be switched off. The next biggest reduction came from changing the type of light bulbs used in the rooms where we spend most of our time. I have the small added task of hanging one, maybe two, loads of laundry on a drying rack once a week...no biggie. The two question marks in the chart are there because my energy meter cannot be used to find the usage of the oven because of the oven's plug size.

Having seen the results of using energy more efficiently, and taking into consideration our house was built in 1938 with its lack of insulation in the walls and terribly inefficient duct work, I'm starting to believe that it will be possible to run a properly built, energy efficient house with the same amount of electricity our dryer uses for one load of laundry.

Some may look at a daily reduction of 6.3 kWh as a drop in the bucket and why such a big deal is made about saving approximately $200 per year. It's about taking a step in the right direction to reduce the amount we consume unnecessarily. If every household in North America were to take steps to eliminate just the phantom loads in their homes then there would be no more need to build new coal-fired or nuclear generating stations. These steps are easy and the benefit to homeowners is immediately measurable. The benefit to the environment will be massive.

Read this CBC article about the difference using electricity more efficiently can make.

"Studies show time and again that for every dollar spent on conservation there will be a $2 or $3 return," says Ben Chin, formerly vice-president of communications at the Ontario Power Authority. "Since 2006, we have spent $1.7 billion on conservation programs — and that has saved $3.8 billion in generation costs and has saved 1,700  megawatts."                                                                                               -CBC News, March 2011

Enthusiastically eliminating phantom loads everywhere,
Mimi