Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

course, I don’t require a tremendous amount of power. For instance, my electric car draws 32 amps at 240 volts, or 7,680 watts (about ¾ of a kilowatt) of power. The air-conditioning pulls 18 amps at 240 volts, or 4,430 watts. A lamp with a compact fluorescent lightbulb draws a mere 1.5 amps at 120 volts, or 18 watts.

Besides, having a solar system with batteries for storage means I don’t have to worry about brownouts or rolling blackouts or natural disasters. I’m self-sufficient to a very great degree. I sometimes hear from my neighbors that the power has been out for several hours, and I’ll have no idea that occurred. And during the 1994 earthquake, for several days mine was the only house in my neighborhood with the lights on and the power functioning.

         When I was first living here, Ed would go out of town, and he sometimes would send me running out to the garage to check the numbers on the battery system. And I’d say, “0.6 and 2.10,” and he’d freak out and start saying, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Switch it up to the grid. But no-no-no. Don’t do that first. Switch this one down first.”

And then I’d be freaking out, because I thought if I didn’t do it right, I was going to blow the house up. He’d finally walk me through it and we’d both heave a huge sigh of relief. “Phew. We’re safe another day.”

Now if I need to switch us over to the grid, it’s not such a big deal, but it did take a little getting used to. Come to think of it, maybe it was just the drama of Ed freaking out on me on the phone.

Net Metering

The type of solar electric system I have now doesn’t have to be connected to the grid, but because I live in an area where it’s easy to be connected—and because my house was already connected when I bought it—I have the option of switching over to the grid as needed. As needed for me always means after 8 P.M. and before 10 A.M., when power is cheapest due to low demand.

There’s another way to go that makes a lot of sense, too. Today, instead of having all those batteries at your house, you can choose net metering. Many states require utility companies to accept renewable energy from their residential customers. Rather than store any excess solar electricity you produce in big batteries, you can feed that electricity directly into the grid. Then, whenever you need more power than your solar electric system is generating, you simply draw that power back from the grid. In essence, you let the grid itself act like a big battery system for your solar electric setup.

Even if your utility company does not allow for net metering, you can still feed any excess power you produce into the grid. However, instead of receiving the full retail price for that power, the utility pays you a wholesale rate for the electricity, which is considerably less.

Can Anyone Go Solar?

As much as I love solar, let me be clear: Solar panels will not work on just any roof.

A good candidate would be a house with a pitched roof that gets a full day—or close to a full day—of sun. A bad candidate would be a roof that gets a lot of shading from another home or from trees. The western part of your exposure is very important. I have to keep a tree that is west of my solar panels very well trimmed. It’s a deciduous tree, so during the winter months, there’s very little shading. There are also hedges that I have to keep after quite regularly because they would eventually shade the panels.

Other bad candidates include roofs that are more challenging—a tile roof, for example, or a flat roof. You can certainly put solar panels on flat roofs, people do it all the time, but you want to be very careful that it’s done by top-notch installers to prevent leaking. Flat roofs are prone to leaking anyway. When you start putting stuff up there, you have to be very, very careful, both with leakage problems and with the exposure problem. Make sure you get a really good day of sun.

Even before you install a solar system, an energy audit is surely in order to determine how much power you use—and whether you can produce enough power to make the installation worthwhile. You can learn your energy history quickly by reviewing your utility bill. You may also want to implement some of the energy-saving techniques we covered in Chapter 1 so you can get away with a somewhat smaller solar electric system.

Solar for the Midwest?

Now, you might be surprised to hear that my system was not installed by a Los Angeles company. It was put in by Michigan Energy Works.

People say, “Solar’s fine for you in California, Arizona, Nevada. These places have a lot of sun. What about the poor people in the Midwest?” I’ve seen this regularly in newspaper op-ed pieces and stories about solar.

Well, guess what, there’s a thriving solar business in the Midwest. Wisconsin. Michigan. Yes, it gets cold there, but it’s not cloudy so much of the time as it is in a place like Seattle, where solar wouldn’t be as viable. It’s often sunny and cold in the Midwest, which is good for generating solar energy. In fact, solar panels lose 15 percent of their efficiency when they get hot, and they don’t have that problem in a cold, bright state. On a sunny winter day in Wisconsin or Michigan, those panels are cranking out full current.

Solar is really practical in most parts of the country. If you’re not sure about your area, get out the Farmer’s Almanac and see how many sunny days per year are typical in your area.

Solar Water Heaters

Solar isn’t used only to create electricity—you can also install a solar