Eco-house beyond reach?








Pandabonium said…
I am planning an off-grid house that will run entirely on renewable energy with solar hot water and PV electric panels. The way to keep the cost of the PV panels down is to use less electricity - a lot less. We are used to wasting huge amounts of energy because it used to be cheap and we were ignorant fo the environmental consequences. Just because we switch to a different power source, doesn't mean we shouldn't look at reducing waste. Quite the opposite.

I will have a refrigerator for example that uses only .1 watt hours per day (actually a converted chest type freezer). Lighting will come from LEDs running on a low voltage line.

Many of today's electrical items use far too much power because the 100 volt or so system they are plugged into was there before they were invented. when you can design a new home from scratch, or entirely rework an older home, you can design out the old way of doing things. Another example would be having a low voltage system to serve the led lights and small items such as computers which does away with the need for transformers on each of the items.

As a result, my house will need only a few panels and the cost will be a 10th of what one might expect. If people would adopt that kind of thinking rather than simply trying switch to solar while doing things the same old wasteful way, it would make the change much more affordable, even considering rewiring.

Reducing the size of energy systems also has another benefit - it lowers the use of resources that they are made of and the CO2 that is released in the mining, manufacturing, and shipping of those products.
Martin J Frid said…
Good plan! Yes, it is silly to try to keep consumption at the same level as when energy was cheap. Interesting perspective that needs to be looked into more!

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