Self- Sustainability

This seems like sound advise and as you say we should begin at the beginning. Honestly, we had not even discussed this aspect of conservation yet.

 

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Well that is pretty damn accurate, you Fraggle were probably a great student of history and even better at analyzing it to draw accurate conclusions.

In regards to what you say about creating ones own energy, everything you say in your post may be true, however, my husband likes to tinker and really wants to work on his ideas when we retire. As long as his tinkering and ideas do not break the bank I will not be the one to dishearten him. After all work is relative, if he wishes to spend his spare time in the lab then so be it. I can assure you though, that we will also get out our instruments and drink our spirits and have a hell of a concert with probably just natures children as our audience.

 

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Well at present, probably a small wind generator on tall (at least twice the height of any nearby trees) pole that is pulled up (by help of car if don't have a bunch of friends to help) and then has the already attached guy wires adjusted* (on a no wind day) for modest tension is your best bet to eventually break even, cost-wise. (Use the AC power it develops for heating hot water in standard tank, so don't need to have frequency at 60 hz or batteries for storage.)

* One on the far side from pull up rope was pre-set to make pole stop nearly vertical when pulled up but some pair of friends on the other guy wires may be needed to keeping it from tiling too much to the sides of the pole / pull up rope plain until the two of set of four can be adjusted if they too were not well calculated and pre-set. I would per set all to length that permits less than 5 degree off vertical tilt to be trimmed out later with turn buckles. With strong friends, you need only 3 or 6 guy wires in each set.

Make sure the metal pole has a good ground for the lighting that may hit it. Also the power wires inside the pole is probably best - study up on how to protect from lightning damage - I'm not knowledgeable enough to advise you on that but think it a good idea if the guy wires are not continuous - have some egg shaped ceramic insulators so the even if they break, the guy wire sections still are joined.

Also make sure you understand how the machine gets to make many 360 turns in the same direction with power wires attached. (electrical "slip rings" ?)

I strongly agree with Billvon's POV in his post 20 so above is only after that is done. Also as Amory Lovings has shown years ago, the saving by your using 1 kwh less electric energy is about 5 kwh reduction in fossil fuel energy due to efficiency of Carnot limited conversion of heat to power and various electric distribution losses.

By later edit: I think I would use guy wires at two levels, Four on the lowest to facilitate stable pull up (with at least two strong friends; but only three at attached at the higher point of the pole as they are longer and each costs more but don't need four. Those three can just "dangle" during pull up phase. Getting machine up high into strong, steady, (non-turbulent) wind is big benefit in total energy capture.

 

If all you want to do is save money, and don't care about the moral stain that goes along with it, there are places that steal taxpayer money to subsidize your addiction and then require the utilities to steal the ratepayer's money to continue subsidizing it. But I would just feel too slimy to do it.

 

I like to think of myself as a contributor to society, not looking for a way to have others pay for my so called addiction. I am not looking to be a cave woman nor a pioneer woman KitemanSA, just looking to save as much money as possible in our day to day running of a household. With the money saved we could do a little traveling, take classes, maybe even invest in stocks, although, I have zero experience and have no clue how to go about gambling in the stock market. Hmm, maybe just playing a little poker with friends will do!

 

Well, payback time for a professionally installed solar power system is now 6-20 years, and after that the return on investment ranges from 3 to 20%. So some people who make such a claim (people who live, for example, in Tucson) are correct - depending on timeframe.

Man, I must be doing something wrong then . . ..

 

Speaking of cavepersons (and the climate of Tucson), I recall several years ago seeing a documentary about some people who established a little community out in some desert. This was at the site of some soft mesas (sandstone I think). They excavated large blocks of the sandstone and then finished them out with wood or tile flooring, even freestanding walls, etc., and then across the big openings they put up exterior walls, facades really, which looked the same as the front view of any tract homes of recent vintage. Inside they were finished out like typical homes except all the windows were in front and the ceiling was the cave rock. I mention this in case you are planning on building a place of your own. As you probably know, you get the geothermal advantage by building into the earth like this. Other methods are to build the moisture proof structure and then dump dirt over it (earth homes) or just bury much or all of the home below grade. But I was looking for that video because I had it in mind that the folks who did this has come up with some small improvised power supplies to compensate for living off the grid.

As for ideas for the hubby, here's some food for thought. Keep in mind these are very crude ideas which lack the higher energy yield of well engineered devices and systems.

Idea #1. He might like to start with a cheap generator or alternator. For example he may be able to pick up a used vehicle alternator for say $50 -$100 or so. And get a car battery to go with it. They're 2-4 times cheaper than Li-ion, last I checked. I would get a cheap battery charger to go with that, and a cheap voltmeter. Next he might look for a ham radio tower - one of the triangular reinforced designs which won't buckle with a turbine on top. That leaves the design task to finding or making the prop w/blades, mounted on a good sturdy bearing of some kind. An old car or truck wheel, with the matching hub and bearing come to mind. At this point I think he could experiment with wooden paddles, or perhaps some frames with suitable fabric stretched across them like the old Dutch windmills. Along the way he could check in here or at the site of his choice and get some guidance on what to expect as far as torque on the tower or whatever other design limits may crop up. Once he has something that actually rotates with the wind, he might want to couple it to the alternator using a belt. This at least makes use of stuff readily available. And I think something along this order is a way to break into the DIY mode with some reasonable expectation of producing a small amount of electricity. Beyond that there's some serious engineering involved.

Idea #2. Solar collectors can be improvised any number of ways. One thing that comes to mind which I think might be about the cheapest for a DIY tinkerer is the use of parabolic reflectors. I say this because I think a creative person can figure out how to get the cost down. I'm thinking of the solar troughs, which resemble gutters, say a yard deep and as long as practical. For starters you might want to build just one, 8 feet long or so (standard construction material length). The idea here is that the gutter is made of rectangles of flexible reflective material shaped into parabolas along the short dimension. For a wooden prototype, you can cut parabolas into, say, 1/8" plywood. These, when attached to a base upright at some interval (a foot or so) they are used like brackets to bend the rectangular reflectors into parabolas. With a simple calculation, done in conjunction with deciding how shallow the parabolic cuts should be made (in the uprights), you establish the focal point of the reflected rays. Now above the gutter you install triangular brackets spanning the yard width of the gutter at the base of each triangle, with their apexes reaching up to the focal point. Install these every foot or along the length of the gutter. At the apex of each triangle you can have some brackets, and across these brackets you lay a section of copper pipe. On either end of the pipe, for starters, you can install standard spigots or couplings of your choosing. You will also want to canter the gutters at an angle equal to your latitude, and then include a swivel so it can be adjusted to face the sun dead on, with about 23 degrees tilt in either direction to account for the seasonal variation. At this point I would stop, fill the thing with water, seal it off, and attach a water pressure gauge. Ideally you could find one with an interface that allows you to log the readings and measure it over a few days. The next step would be to incorporate the collector into some sort of heat engine that turns a generator. For that there are all kinds of approaches. I'll stop here though since this get a little more involved. But for the moment just assume you have another device your hubby threw together which converts heat to electricity.

 

For perhaps a more appealing good-for-solar location, we generate all our power from solar in San Diego. Our payback time was about 11 years. (And since we've had our first system for 10 years now, we are in pretty good shape.)

My Tuesdays start at 7:30am with a conference call with a company in Finland, and end around 9pm on a teleconference with companies in Korea, China and Japan. I obviously haven't figured out how to make the 40 hour a week thing work just yet.

 

Sorry I know you're trying to be helpful but some of what you said is pretty bad advice.

Car batteries last perhaps 50 cycles in a RE system (that would be less than 2 months.) They are far more expensive than lithium-ions or even good deep cycle lead acid batteries per kilowatt-hours delivered. They are not designed to be discharged over hours; they are designed to give one big slug of power for a few seconds then be recharged for a few hours.

All of that would be a fun project. It will not produce usable amounts of power. Hundreds of such projects are undertaken every year by people across the country; they generally become "lessons in what not to do" on renewable energy forums.

For the cost of all that you could get a few PV panels, charge a pair of T105's (known colloquially as "golf cart batteries") and get a decent amount of backup/alternate power to the tune of a kilowatt-hour a day. Such a system would last a few years if cared for.

Sounds like it would be another interesting project. But again, the request was how to become more self sufficient, and neither suggestion above accomplishes that.

(This strikes somewhat close to home because I have spent a not inconsiderable time trying to salvage systems even better planned than the ones you describe above. It's never pleasant to tell someone that the system they invested a few thousand in, and months of effort, isn't even worth its weight in scrap.)

 

So what do you do now to save money?

Outside laundry drying in warm months saves me $10 per month on electric.

CF bulbs. Cheap is not better. Get the mid to high range in cost (personally sylvania has been the best for me). I date them with a marker when I put them in so I know how long they last. When I originally swapped out mine 20 years ago in high use areas like kitchen, they dropped my electric bill $5 per month.

We have an auto on outside light at night. Shutting that bad boy down cut my bill by $15 per month. We only turn it on when needed.

Next up at home, my fridge will go on a timer so its off at night. No need to run it when no one is going to be opening/shutting the door. Technically, a working household could put their fridge on a timer so it fires up approx an hour before household wakes. Shuts down again an hour after people leave, fire back up before arrival.

http://www.menards.com/main/electri...door-7-day-digital-timer/p-1858558-c-6471.htm

 

As usual, you are correct, but here is why:
To get the high "cranking current" / torque to start an IC engine car, the battery must have large plate surface area as current density per square cm is limiting by the rate ions can come to the plate. Thus car batteries have many more thin plates than one designed for repeated deep discharge, like one I bought years ago so I could fish with electric motor boat on Lock Raven drinking water reservoir north of Baltimore and a couple of others. Gasoline motors were prohibited. If I had used a regular car battery there is a good change that the thin plates would over heat, buckle and touch killing that cell. I don't remember how much more per kwh of storage you pay, but the production volume is much less so they are more expensive.

 

Think of this as a question of optimization. The given requirements are different than the ones you're maximizing for. Here I'm responding to the request for project ideas for a tinkerer. That changes the curve entirely.

If Mr Quinnsong can lay his hands on a car battery for free then this is something for him to consider after he wears it out. Otherwise if he gets 50 cycles out of a new one, that's only a buck or two a pop -- a bargain for someone who's just tinkering and not yet committed. At some point, if he commits, he will face the question at the level you're optimizing to. And then once he has a handle on how much storage he needs, he'll be better prepared to tackle this at your level or optimization. And at any point in time he can select a longer life battery. I certainly wasn't advocating against it. No matter how you cut it, he's not boxed in. My thinking was to gravitate to car parts thinking they are abundant, cheap, and that he may already have some laying around and/or he may be familiar with auto mechanics to some degree.

No one said this would be easy. The challenge here, as I see it, is to first figure out how to make a few free watt-hours usable, and then to go back and rethink the overall strategy to raise that to a few hundred watt-hours -- which might be enough to light a couple of rooms at night -- and maybe then turn to the real challenge, which requires some tradeoffs between a substantial cost and the degree of austerity imposed by limiting power consumption. There is a learning curve; I'm just suggesting he start in the shallow waters and work his way to the deeper understanding of system design.

Here the challenge is to meet that head-on, with honesty and basic skills not always seen in other sites. We neither want to encourage Mr Q to waste any time or money, nor do we wish to discourage him from dusting off his workbench and trying a few cheap ideas that he might be able knock off in a few weekends. Unlike the sites you mentioned, we actually know how to estimate things like peak and average power, efficiency & losses, etc., so nothing will be oversold here.

Then add that to the list as #3. (Or bump it up to #1 and bump my two suggestions down.) I really have no idea what Mr Q may or may not consider too much or not enough DIY to meet his expectations. I just intentionally skipped photovoltaics believing it was too reliant on pricey components and left not much to the imagination of the tinkerer. But if he's amenable to that approach, by all means that should be on his list.

Actually this post I made recently was not answering that question. I was merely responding to quinnsong's other request, for some suggested projects for her husband to tinker with.

I'm not at all suggesting that they spend thousands. For that reason I am suggesting he try something small, low cost, low power. I think the little solar trough can be built practically for free, depending on what kind of stuff Mr Q may have lying around. Even if all he does is make one warm meal a day from it, and only on sunny days, he'll be able to immerse himself into the realities of this--the small benefits and the enormous limitations of getting the large amounts of power we customarily take for granted. But on the other hand, suppose this led to him putting up 100 of them somewhere where there's ample space? Who knows. I'm working with very little information, just floating ideas, not selling anything.

It's actually quite challenging when you think of it. The only realistic approach for a person looking into this is to tackle it from both the supply and demand sides, recognizing the fact that to sustain yourself at the normal high demand levels of modern convenience is ludicrous if your objective is to get off the grid for less than many years cost in utility bills.

 

@ Aqueous,

Your posts are exactly what Mr. Quinn is after. The other posters billvon, Fraggle, milkweed, and even KitemanSA(cavewoman hmmph) are for the more practical side of sustainability which is where I come in. Oh and Billy, too.

 

Hi there quinnsong. Heh Heh at least he could have said caveperson.

Ok, thx for the feeback. I might add that the wheel bearing from a car would be my first choice for a windmill project since it would allow you to grow the size of the propeller blades without having to start over from scratch since it's heavy duty . For a lighter, smaller model he might consider bicycle or motorcycle bearings.

The solar collector is a pretty good contender for even large farms. There was a quite extensive analysis and test of something similar done by the Dept of Energy out of their Boulder Colo research facility. (Golden I believe). I haven't yet dug it up but if I find it I'll post the link. It may be too dry and technical, but it does give you some idea of its viability. My interest back when I was looking at it was to see how much energy is lost by the pipe naturally radiating in the open air. As I recall the better designs had put some kind of insulation around the outer part of the pipe to reduce that.

You've probably got a pretty good idea of how these systems get very large and costly. I think we've touched on the absolute limits of wind and solar power, which you can use as rule of thumb if and when you get down to actually estimating what your expected energy consumption will be.

Let me try one more thing on you. This is kind of a quirky idea but I'd like to give it a trial run. First I'l say in advance that involves two chemicals, one of which is dangerous in large amounts, and the other which is notoriously toxic. These are ammonia and mercury. The technology comes from about 100 years ago and was abandoned when cheap electricity made other designs feasible. The application was in refrigeration, which means it could be applied to cooling the home in the summer, and I suppose it may be reversed to provide heat, though I haven't thought that through.

The machine itself is remarkably simple. You have a section of iron pipe which is sealed like a tube, containing ammonia and big gob of mercury, All you need to do is to hurl this tube around like a centrifuge and the mercury acts like a piston, compressing the ammonia. It warms up, and you blow the warm air outside with a fan. Then shut the damper and stop the rotation. The ammonia expands and become cold. The other damper opens and the fan blows cold air into the room. Compensating for the potential chemical risk is that there is no moving part to fail inside the tube so it can be well sealed and I think made very safe. I also say this because I noticed there was a museum that had one of the models that has been running for something like 100 years.

I mention this because another potential application of a windmill is to take the rotation of the shaft and use it directly to power this device without the intermediate stage of converting back and forth between electrical and mechanical energy. It also means the device only runs when the wind blows, which is not likely the climate that brings hot weather. But then this might be useful as a home refrigerator/freezer, with a standby motor to power it when the wind isn't blowing. In any case it's another idea I thought you folks might like to ponder.

On that same tack, as you probably know there are refrigerators that run from heat sources. It might be feasible to couple a solar collector directly to such a refrigerator and similarly reduce the complexity and losses of converting back and forth between mechanical and electrical energy, I have given no thought to the scale of this, but based on one such device from 100 yrs ago or so, it took only hot water to prep the device, and then it chilled the food in the icebox about as good as ice would, at least by the accounts I've seen. The 8 foot collector I suggested (>2 kW peak, ideal) would make a pretty good testbed for some of these ideas, esp if you're thinking about ways to tackle air-conditioning which is almost anathema to the idea of energy conservation.

Here's a couple of early devices I had in mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icyball

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator

I'll see if I can find the ammonia-mercury refrigerator.

I noticed the site for Mother Earth News is up. They're famous for their self-sufficiency tips. I glanced around and nothing jumped out at me, but if self-sufficiency is your goal, they're in that same head space with you.

 

I have just finished copying and pasting all comments so far and am emailing them to the mister, he will be so pleased. Thank you all so much!

 

Something that should be useful in lighting is the LED. It can be pretty simple to build custom lighting from scratch with LEDs. In locations in Africa without electrical power service, people have used LED lamps powered by batteries, even car batteries. An easy option is to use LED flashlights as much as convenient because a set of batteries can last many hours with such an LED flashlight:

http://www.dorcy.com/p-409-41-2461-25-lumen-2aa-led-flashlight.aspx.

Also, it possibly could be taken a step further by using rechargeable batteries in the flashlight.

 

Actually the sites I mentioned will tell a potential solar tinkerer to, before anything else, estimate their peak and average loads, then make assumptions on losses based on the type of battery/inverter/link voltage/storage voltage etc. Then they will typically run them through a typical design cycle for an alternative energy system. They'll also have some details about the problems you will see using (for example) an automotive alternator for generating power, since several of them have actually done this. These are people who do this for a living, so they generally know what they are doing.

This place is a great place to discuss random science topics but is a poor place to get specific advice for alternative energy systems. (Not because people aren't well intentioned, just because there are people here with more ideas than experience.)

If that's the challenge, a wooden-blade-car-alternator-and-antenna-tower windmill is not the way to make that happen. There are much better ways to do it.

If the challenge is to give someone something to tinker with, then it's a decent idea - provided the tinkerer is willing to take the significant risk of damage to their home/car and not-insignificant risk to his life.

Your suggestions are decent ones for someone who wants to run on grid power and just tinker in their spare time. Again, my warning is only that your suggestions will not accomplish the goal (as stated in the first post) of finding "good ideas on how to live as self sufficiently as possible" or even the goal of "how to make a few free watt-hours usable."

Definitely! Load reduction is always the first step.