My wife, son and I live in an approximately 440 square foot studio apartment in Queens, New York. We have watched helplessly as our monthly utility bill has increased over the past 6-12 months from roughly $70 to over $120. I am certain that you have heard something to this effect from many people.
Are there any alternative energy sources that we can use to power our individual apartment and reduce our reliance on the local utility? I am envisioning a renewable energy source that can be stored inside the apartment and power, e.g., lamps, television, home computers, kitchen appliances, etc., but that doesn’t cost unprecedented sums of money. Is there something out there to your knowledge?
Thank you for your time and attention.
Mike J.
Forest Hills, New York
Mike:
I know the area well. One of my clients is Rego Park, the shopping center in Queens, and we remotely monitor all the tenants monthly utility usage. There is only a limited amount of things you can do since you are renting and cannot alter the electrical systems and may have only a limited amount of exterior wall and no roof access.
As I have described in many past articles, if your refrigerator is over 5 years old, it is costing you more money to operate than a new model. If it is over 12 years old then it is really costing you money each month, and may represent 15 to 20% of your monthly bill. This is the first thing I would replace.
You can also replace all of your light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs. If lighting quality is critical like a work light, replace with halogen having half the watts as the incandescent bulb being replaced. Do not replace only a few bulbs at a time, take a week end and replace them all, then wait a few weeks to see the impact on your bill. Many appliances like TV’s, stereos, cell phone chargers, and anything with a remote control will still be using electrical power 24 hours per day even if they are turned off.
Buy several multi-plug strips and use the switch to turn off all power to all your entertainment equipment when not in use. If you have an electric range, this is also a real energy hog, so limit its use by using a micro-wave oven more often. These also use lots of power, but they cook much faster so are only on a few minutes.
Finally, I am expecting electric rates to climb even higher next year and remember there are lots of city and state taxes added to your electric bill each month by New York which has some of the highest in the nation.
I live in Alaska and am going to replace the windows in my home with Low E Argon gas filled glass. I am getting different advice as to which side of the glass should be on the outside.
Bob Yerger
Bob:
I am tempted to give you a smart answer like they tell the guys installing sod on new lawns – put the green side up!. You put the outside side of any window facing the outside! Unless you are just buying glass panels, all window frames are made with interior trim for looks and exterior trim to keep out rain and drafts, and this determines which side faces out.
You will find that Low-Emissivity glass (Low E) means there is a coating on the glass or by lowering the iron content in the glass itself that helps reduce thermal heat transfer by increasing the “U” factor of the window. If this is done by a coating, it is usually applied to the interior glass and since it “reflects” thermal heat it makes no difference from which direction this heat is coming. In other words, it will reduce thermal heat passing through the glass from the outside to inside without reducing solar radiation passing through the glass, and it will reduce thermal heat on the inside from passing through to the outside which would be a heat loss.
I think you will find the Argon-gas filled space between the two layers of glass provides far more heat loss reduction and going with a larger “gap” will improve the energy performance over a “thinner” window assembly. Just for the record, they also make 3-layer thermal windows for very cold locations but remember that each layer you add will reduce the solar heat gain.
I have a Yamaha 1000 watt generator. If I plug in my battery charger or even if I use the generators battery charger mode, my deep cycle battery does not charge as full or as fast as it does if I use my household 110 outlet.
Why is this ? Both are 110 Volt sources.
Jim Mowatt
Jim:
Actually they both are NOT 110 volts as you suggested. AC power is alternating current with the voltage going from a maximum negative value to a maximum positive value, which makes this reversing of polarity 60 times each second. If you could see this voltage it would form a perfect sinewave curve with half above a zero voltage and half below. When you connect a voltmeter it will read 110 to 120 volts depending on your utility supplier, but the meter is reading the “average” voltage since the meter cannot move fast enough to display what the actual voltage is for that fraction of a second. If you use a special root-mean-square (RMS) type voltmeter, it will actually read 169 volts, which is the voltage between the highest and lowest peak of the sinewave curve.
Now comes the rub. When you start plugging more appliances or lights into a wall outlet, this 169 peak volts remains solid and does not “lug down”. However, all lower cost and smaller generators will start lowering this 169 peak volts as you add more loads to the generator. This is how these generators handle heavy loads and avoid damage.
Unfortunately, almost all battery chargers are designed to utilize ONLY the top peak and bottom peak area of this voltage sinewave, which means any drop below the 169 RMS voltage will cause the charger to not function at all. There are battery chargers and inverters designed to operate from generator power without any problem, but if your charger does not specifically say so then it will not. There are also high end generators that do not have this voltage drop problem. For example, the Honda generators that have an “i” after the model number means the generator includes a built-in inverter circuit to maintain a perfect sinewave output and should power any battery charger or anything else as long as it does not exceed its load capacity.
Finally, regardless of the battery charger you have, I would not expect any 1000 watt generator to have enough capacity to charge a bank of deep cycle batteries. You will need to replace either, or both, the generator and charger, depending on their design.
I would like to put Air conditioning in my pickup truck camper shell to keep my dogs cool in the summer. It would only be in use when I was traveling down the road, not while the truck was turned off. Here was what I was thinking – could you offer an opinion on whether it would work or how to to do it, if it is even possible.
[I want to] put an RV air conditioning unit on the top of my camper shell and run that off an inverter connected to my pickups battery.
I do have a 2500/5000 watt inverter but I wonder if the air conditioning unit would suck so much energy that the alternator could not keep the truck battery charged up going down the road.. My truck has two batteries up front
Mike
Hello, MIke.
The problem is not battery size, it’s your alternator capacity. There is no way an RV air conditioner can run off one or two truck batteries for more than a few minutes without draining them. For example, the smallest, newest, and most efficient truck camper AC unit draws 8 amps at 120 VAC. Assuming a 90% system efficiency, this would be a 1,100 watt “run” load on your inverter, and require an inverter that can handle at least 2 kW “start” load since any compressor load is a dead short on the power source for the first few seconds it is trying to rotate.
You said you had a 2,500 watt inverter which should be able to handle a small RV air conditioner, but that is not your main problem. Your inverter will have a constant draw of 88 amps at 12 volts DC while an 8 amp load air conditioner is running, and could draw up to 150 amps for a few seconds every time the compressor kicks in. This means your truck alternator and all related cables need to be large enough to handle these larger current flows and still have enough excess power to operate your lights and other electrical loads in the truck. Each time you stop at a light, there will not be enough amps coming from your alternator even if it is a larger 150 to 170 amp heavy duty model.
This is why the air conditioning unit in an RV is always wired into the exterior shore power or generator panel, and not powered from the batteries. Any 120 VAC electrical load on an inverter will draw 11 times the AC amps from a 12 volt DC battery.
The article is great for getting started with solar/battery systems. I never knew it was so simple.
My question is, how would one add a secondary generator for days when the batteries are dead at night? Basically, I want something that will combine the power of the solar, with the power supplied by the alternator in my car. That way each power source can charge the batteries.
Thanks!
Anthony Hildoer
Anthony
Any boating supply store will have “dual” battery chargers, “dual” charge controllers, and “dual” voltage regulators. There are other solar suppliers you can check out, but for small 12 volt systems you can usually find these items at a local boating supply store. Almost all recreational boats have two identical batteries and a switch to allow changing from one to the other. This makes sure if you run down one battery while listening to radios or running lights while anchored out in the water, you will still have a fully charged battery to start the engine. The dual battery voltage regulators will charge the first battery then the second battery without connecting them to each other. That was the equipment used in the article.
On the other hand, if you wanted to also charge this battery from a separate energy source like a solar panel or small gas generator, just be sure to use the proper charge controller for each source which will allow charge to flow into the battery even if it is also being charged by other chargers at the same time. The charging current from the other charging sources will not “back up” into each other. As long as each charging source has its own charge controller, nothing will cause a problem with the other devices. However, if one of the charging sources has a much larger charge capacity or is set for a higher charging voltage than the others, it will take over all of the charging as the other charge controllers will “see” this higher voltage and assume the battery is fully charged and then stop their charging.
I read your article from Issue #102 entitled “Solar-Powered Refrigerators” because my family and I were considering purchasing one for our backwoods cabin. It was very helpful and I have recommended it to my family as a good source of information but I was curious to know if you still had the SunDanzer and Sun Frost solar refrigerators and if so, how they are holding up with time.
Thank you,
Alex Walowicz
Alex:
We have owned both an RF-16 and RF-19 size SunFrost refrigerator/freezer since 1994 and two SunDanzer top load freezers since 2001. Since we have had the SunFrost units longer, we have had more repairs. Although SunFrost may still be the most energy efficient refrigerator made and are clearly designed for very long life, they have in my opinion, several problems that only recently have seen any improvement.
First, the door latch is plastic with slotted screw holes and both sides are attached with screws. If these get out of alignment, and they will, when you close the door they break off. Although they are cheap and easy to replace yourself, you better have several on hand. Second, the seals around the doors are made of a thin plastic strip that has been “crimped” into a “V” shape with peel and stick adhesive on one side. These also are low cost and easy to replace yourself, but they need to be replaced about every 2 years. The thermostat for the freezer compartment will fail, and this was clearly anticipated as the design includes a spare sensor built in when manufactured. When this sensor fails, and it will, you have to abandon the mechanical capillary-tube temperature sensor that controls the compressor and install a new electronic sensor that you connect to the extra sensor wires. The earlier models also had very-easy-to-break adjustable door shelves that would always fall off and break when over-loaded, but a recent design change has made these much better.
Finally, to achieve the very high energy efficiency, no SunFrost models have automatic defrost of circulating fans, so expect to learn how to defrost a freezer and refrigerator like your parents had to do. This sounds like a minor problem, but if you live in a humid area like we do, you can build up several inches of ice in the freezer in only a few months, and the back of the refrigerator section can build up an inch of ice over the entire surface in about the same time. Once this happens, the refrigerator section will no longer keep foods below 40 degrees as all the heat removal is going into keeping the ice from melting and your food will soon spoil. Since the refrigerator/freezer models have separate compressor and temperature controls for each compartment, it is possible during de-frosting to only turn off one compartment at a time. To avoid damaging the plastic interiors while chipping off the ice buildup, we just move everything into the section that is still operating, turn off the other section, and prop open the door. In about an hour you will hear the ice start to fall, which can usually be removed as one or two large sheets all at once. Then a quick wipe down, then reverse the process and do the other compartment.
The SunDanzer has a type of “lung” or bladder somewhere in the inner workings that expands and contracts when you open and close the top door. They claim this reduces the unit “sucking” in warm humid air after you re-close the lid due to the lower interior air pressure from the cold. This actually works as we have gone as long as 2 or more years without defrosting. To appreciate what is going on, if you close the door of a SunFrost refrigerator/freezer, you can clearly hear room air being drawn into the interior as it makes a hissing sound as it passes the door seals. SunDanzer does not make combination refrigerator/freezer units, while the SunFrost can be a 2 door unit having both sections. I thought I would have problems with a top load freezer getting access to foods near the bottom, but all SunDanzer models include a system of top racks mounted in a track system that lets you move the upper half of frozen foods sideways to expose what is stored below.
If you need a super-efficient 12 or 24 volt DC refrigerator that includes a freezer section, and you can handle the nuisance repairs described above, then I still recommend the SunFrost models. They are very expensive, but with regular maintenance they will last and last. If you can get by with just a freezer or just a refrigerator that must be super efficient and run on 12 or 24 volt DC, or can afford to buy one of each, then I would recommend the SunDanzer. I think they are just as energy efficient and require much less maintenance, but again they are top loading.
On a final note, all models from both manufacturers are either 12 or 24 volt DC unless something has changed recently, and since most off-grid solar homes are starting to use 48 volt battery banks to reduce wire sizes you will need a DC to DC converter to use any of these on these higher voltage battery systems.
I have purchased some property that has an exist ing well on it. It is powered by 230v 1hp Webtrol submersible pump. I would like to convert it to solar/ wind for off grid applications when we lose the grid power out there. Being out in the sticks this happens a lot. Do you have any suggestions for transfer switch/ batteries/ controller/ inverter/ panels? Or can it even be accomplished using my existing pump?
Sincerely,
Larry Wiley
Larry:
This is a large motor load and would require a very expensive inverter and associated batteries, switchgear, and solar array to supply this large load. Since you would not want to spend about $15,000.00 for the basic battery-inverter system plus another $10,000.00 for a solar array just to power this single pump, most people would install the solar system to power ALL of their critical electric loads including the well pump which makes it more cost effective.
A far easier and less costly way to do this is install a SECOND well pump which would be located “above” the elevation of you existing well pump, and would have its own smaller pvc pipe up and out of the well. Since this would be a 12 or 24 volt DC deep well pump depending on depth, you could drive your truck over and power it using jumper cables during a power outage and just pump out into a large tub or barrels. If you want this to also supply the house piping system, you will need a check valve in each line from each pump before they are tied together into one line feeding the house. This will keep one pump from trying to pump back down into the well through the other pump which will be off.
Both pumps have to “see” a pressure switch at the expansion tank for proper control so we always install two switches side by side. The AC pump switch is set for 50 to 60 psi, and the DC pump switch is set for 30 to 40 psi. Since the AC pump is larger and will have much more pressure, it will always be the pump that satisfies the higher setting switch. However, when the AC power fails and the pressure keeps dropping below the low limit for the AC pump. the lower setting switch will activate the DC pump if it is connected to a source of emergency power.
If the depth of water is less than 50 feet, you may want to install a hand pump like you see in old westerns. They are still available but are only for shallow water depths.
I just purchased an old mill here in SC and along with it are 2 very large hydro power generators that have been stored for several years. One is a 1000 KW Westinghouse and the other is a 1200 KW General Electric.
I am trying to find a market to sell these to be used instead of just scrapping them
If you have any ideas please send me some contact info.
Thanks,
Mike Teal
Mike:
If I had just purchased an old mill with generators this large I would be looking into putting them back into service. With electric rates getting ready to climb through the roof in the next 2 years, these would provide all of your power needs plus selling lots of excess power back to the utilities. I would not scrap these as there are many old mills across the country that have been placed back in service by private owners and I am sure they are looking for replacement equipment and parts. As long as these have been protected from the weather they should be in good condition since they are just a rotating coil of wire.
Here is a friend of mine that is involved in this field who may be able to help you: Old Mill Power Company
