Saturday, November 03, 2012

My Wife Asked How to ...

Some interesting tidbits ...Wiring a Generator to Your House

We're going on day 5 without utility power at my house in Pennington, New Jersey. Thanks to Wattvision, we know our home's exact load profile, so we were able to match our generator to our needs, saving tens-of-thousands of dollars in the process. I'd like to share how we did it, so you can do it, too.

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When powered by the utility, we use about 15 kWh / day at the current rate. At 17 cents per kWh, we have some of the most expensive electricity in America, but it's still only about $3/day at the moment

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The generator uses about 8 gallons of fuel if we were to run it constantly for 24 hours. Assuming you can get a gallon of gas for about $3.50, that's about $28/day.

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The energy required to run our home for a typical day last week was about 15 kilowatt-hours. So how many AA batteries is that?

A single high-end rechargable AA battery is rated at 1.2v at 2 Ah. So that's 2.4 Wh. So to run my house for a day, we'll require at least 6,250 AA batteries. Putting aside the cost of the management electronics and all the wiring and little boxes we'll need to buy for these batteries, that will cost > $15,000. Ouch. (You can buy a pack of 8 batteries for about $20 on Amazon).


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