Freedom with the Sun & Wind
(Page 2 of 3)
The first system was a crude (eminently non-code-compliant) setup. When I wasn't welding frames for the solar array, I was studying the manuals that came with the boxes and boxes of alien parts and equipment. Much to my surprise, after a time it began to look possible, if not exactly easy. I wired it all together, testing and re-testing as I worked. It was a basic solar-electric system: a solar array, a charge controller, a battery bank and an inverter.
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Simple. Even so, I don't remember if, when I turned it on for the first time, I expected sparks and then an explosion, or just one massive blast. But the system only powered up and hummed. I screwed a lightbulb into a socket. It lit. I plugged in a drill. It spun. Then I decided to go for broke and plugged in my table saw. When the saw whirred into service without hesitation I had the awesome feeling I was witnessing a miracle.
When the saw whirred into service ... I had the awesome feeling I was witnessing a miracle.
I had just wired together my first photovoltaic system. The myriad nuances of even that little system would take months to grasp, but our chunk of the mountain had clean, quiet electricity for the very first time. A little wood-heated cabin with a couple of lights and a few appliances, however, is a weekender's toy compared to what we had in mind. The new house we were planning was an 1,800-square-foot, handcrafted log structure with radiant-floor heat, a system that uses a propane-fired boiler to heat water, which then runs through plastic tubing embedded in lightweight gypsum concrete between the subfloor and the finished floor. Since the hot water for each of the five zones is circulated by thermostat-controlled 120-volt pumps, we knew it would be taxing for our solar and wind system. To further complicate things, we also wanted a washer and dryer, a dishwasher and refrigerator, computers and TVs, and a microwave oven. And we planned to use our hybrid solar-and-wind system to draw water from 540 feet underneath the ground.
The smartest decision we ever made was not to ask any professional installers if we were spitting into the wind, since everyone we've talked to since then has told us that it would take two inverters to run such a big well pump, in addition to everything else (which would be true, I suppose, if we tried to run everything all at once.)
In our blissful state of ignorance, we did some rough calculations, took our best guess, and stood by our decision. And in the end, our system supplied enough power to run all our appliances and enabled us to establish our publishing business at home. The range, clothes dryer and refrigerator are fueled by propane, and every light in the house is a compact fluorescent. Our biggest TV is a 20-inch. Our electricity is provided by a 1,000-watt wind generator, which drills a 9foot-diameter hole in the wind, and a 1,140watt solar array that captures a mere 100 square feet of sunlight. Our storage capacity consists of 20 golf-cart batteries. With cell phones and satellite dishes for TV and Internet service, we have all the material trappings of a modern life, without the pollution that typically accompanies it.
