On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 11:29:23AM -0600, Jon Elson wrote:
> >
> Yes, but if you are 20 miles from the grid, and the only person out
> there who wants to hook up, the power company will usually charge you
> a HUGE fee, well over $10K to bring out the lines. If you are really
> lucky, they might be planning on bringing power out your way, so you
> should always ask, but the answer may not be pleasing.
When we last asked, about 20 years ago, it was about $60k to connect out
on the farm, and about 20 acres of forest would have to be bulldozed for
the line. Prices aren't likely to have fallen much, and now we have to
plant 10 trees for every one we 'doze.
> I agree, running a Diesel generator 24/7 is totally insane, and the
> off-grid home power people have all sorts of solutions for this.
Yeah. There's plenty to do outside, so who needs power until dark?
With the help of a full-sized gas refrigerator, that works for us.
In the evening we arc up the genny.
> For low-power appliances like digital alarm clocks, they have 12 V DC
> versions with crystal oscillators for RV use, and LED lighting would
> be the best thing to get, and run off 12 V power, too. You could run
> the rest of the place off batteries and an inverter, and fire up the
> generator once a day to charge the batteries. Get solar panels to
> charge the batteries for days when the machine shop is not being used.
> Get a Beagle Board and car-type LCD screen for you general purpose
> computer, the Beagle only draws 3 W and the 12 V LCDs take maybe 8 W
> when the backlight is on. The Beagle can't run EMC2 just yet, but
> eventually there will be a real time package for it.
If we still lived out there the whole time, I'd do much of that. (And
get new deep cycle batteries for the 24v [1] inverter.) But we lost
between 600 and 700 large trees in the storms in 2006. That's several
thousand tonnes of hardwood, which will rot away in 50 years or so.
Burning fossil fuel in the petrol generator isn't as appealing as a
steam engine fooshing away quietly, with some boiler management
electronics, and an automatic stoker. (It's just that boilers are a bit
dangerous, unless you go for a monotube.)
Erik
[1] A 48v sinewave inverter would be better, but expensive.
(Even at 24v, the DC draw is hefty when you pull a few amps of 240v)
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