Electric Bill just went up 2.5x in 1 month

[lucky7]

Interesting and thanks for the write up EG.

I would have thought a centrally planned country would have used the time they bought with brutal societal controls to vaccinate everyone and to get boosted with effective mRNA shots. They didn’t. I thought they would have built up hospital and ICU capacity. From what I’ve heard (admittedly from a distance) they haven’t. I would have thought society would have gently and gradually reopened in summer so as to avoid higher seasonal transmission rate in winter. Well, they waited till after President Xi was effectively made a dictator. Now it’s winter. Interesting timing.

I really feel sorry for the Chinese people. Especially with lunar New Year travel coming up, this could get ugly.

sorry for the topic wander…

 

[DDoug]

Thank You EG for taking the time to write that up.
Here's the latest in my In-box:

China's COVID spike not due to lifting of restrictions, WHO director says

Cases were exploding in China well before the government's decision to abandon its strict "zero-COVID" policy, the director said, quashing suggestions that the sudden reversal caused a spike.

www.reuters.com

 

[Ox]

8/30? WOW!

And I thought that we had it bad here?
I heard that our local skewl had 100 kids missing yesterday, but that is out of 600.
Just regular sick tho... I'm sure there's some Wuhan mixed in there as well, but - it's all the same at this point ...

Interesting about the Journalist and riot info, but anyone can video anything at any time these days, so ...



-------------

Well hey, if you catch it and die, you'll let us know eh?
Ox

 

[Conrad Hoffman]

I've yet to see any numbers for what people are paying. How much did you pay? How many kWh did you use? Divide the two and tell me the price per kWh. For comparison, my residential rate is about $0.145/kWh. There's a town near here that's under $0.06/kWh because they have a well run public utility. The average for the area is closer to 0.18/kWh.

 

[lucky7]

$0.079/kWh. Canadian dollars. Equals 5.7cents USD

thats our funny money in western Canada…

 

[MrWhoopee]

PG&E, rural northern Californa, $0.20/kWh

Would love to move to Canada, but I'm too old and too poor.

 

[aarongough]

If I had bought extra by way of a screaming good deal, I'd put my fifty on the roof, a couple dozen on a rack just to the south of the same building (if you have the clear space for it), and put the rest in storage. Panels drop out, on our 24kW system about 1-2 per year, and mind your inverter setup. You don't want to lose a phase in the shop if a bird poops on the wrong cell of one of your panels or you drop one for some other reason.

But other than that, go for it! I hope to hear of your success.

Great tips, thanks! I hadn't thought about keeping spares but that's a really good idea! And yeah $55 each was too good of a deal to turn down. I ended up buying the seller out of stock lol.

All three inverters in my 3 phase setup will share the same bank of batteries, so there should not be any issues with a single phase going down unless a single inverter is overloaded or fails... I *think* they communicate to each other about failures and should all shut down, but that's definitely something worth checking!

 

[aarongough]

Here in southern ontario we can choose to be on "Time of Use" or "Tiered" pricing. I have chosen to stay on tiered pricing. First 900kW/h is $0.087, all use after that is $0.103

We have a connection fee and regulatory charges as well:
Rural delivery fee: $90.76
Regulatory charges: $8.52
Ontario energy rebate: -$33.15

Our latest bill was $287 for 1,927 kWh

Worth noting our heating costs are not included in that because it's propane. Propane prices here are high, about $0.849 / liter. I just installed a heat-pump into our central air handler so we can avoid paying for propane and also avoid those direct Co2 emissions. Looks like it will cost us about $85/month in electricity to heat the house with the heat pump, as opposed to about ~$160/month when heating with propane. The heat pump was $8,200 fully installed. (36,000 BTU Bosch Inverter heat pump)

I am looking forward to when the solar is all installed and our electricity becomes 'free'!

 

[standardparts]

The panels are 17.3 sq feet each, so 110 of them = 1,903 sq feet, plus extra to allow for a little space between the panels for mounting and so on. I have one really large south sloping roof on the shop that will fit about 50 panels. The remainder will go on other roof surfaces or on the house which will also get its own inverters and batteries sometime in the distant future. I probably over-bought on the panels, but they were so inexpensive it seemed wise to just overdo it!

110 panels takes up a LOT of roof space lol.

Part of the work I did on the 'new' workshop building was reinforcing an area of the roof that was terribly 'under built'. 2x10" lumber on 24" centers spanning 20 feet... In an area that gets 62lbs / sq foot of snow load?? No thanks, you can bet I reinforced the hell out of that! Sistered in an extra 2x10 on every joist, and then built an engineered beam to support the mid-point of that span.

The actual roof loading for solar is not bad at all. I worked it out to be about 5 lbs per square foot including racking, insignificant compared to snow loads here, so any roof designed with any amount of safety margin should be good for the panels. Plus there's the benefit that panels on a sloped roof are really good at shedding snow, so the total loading is probably way lower than without the panels!

Most solar panels are warrantied to have about 85% output after 25 years. But usually they do better than that. Even if we assume the worst case that they're already at only 85% output. Their capacity is still 195 watts each which over 110 panels is still 21.5 kw, so definitely worth it I think!

Thanks for the response...saw the 110 panels number and was trying to visualize placement of that many panels.
Your mention of roof construction/condition is good to bring into the discussion especially in areas experiencing large snow loads.

 

[aarongough]

If I had bought extra by way of a screaming good deal, I'd put my fifty on the roof, a couple dozen on a rack just to the south of the same building (if you have the clear space for it), and put the rest in storage. Panels drop out, on our 24kW system about 1-2 per year, and mind your inverter setup. You don't want to lose a phase in the shop if a bird poops on the wrong cell of one of your panels or you drop one for some other reason.

But other than that, go for it! I hope to hear of your success.

Additional question: How are you able to tell when you lose a panel? Are you running strings, micro-inverters, optimizers?

I assume if you're running strings and a panel goes down then the whole string goes down?

 

[triumph406]

I worked for the company that ran the Transonic wind tunnel in El Segundo CA.

During the summer they couldn't run during the day as energy usage would have been so expensive as to make the facility un competitive. They were paranoid about when they would turn the compressors on to pump the tanks. They had to avoid getting bumped up to the next rate.

Some of the Wind Tunnels at AEDC (Arnold Air Force base Tennessee) use so much power the facilities have to call up the TVA to book time, so the TVA knows when to generate extra Hydro power.

My electric bill is probably about .00001% of AEDC's

 

[BoxcarPete]

Additional question: How are you able to tell when you lose a panel? Are you running strings, micro-inverters, optimizers?

I assume if you're running strings and a panel goes down then the whole string goes down?

Yes, we have individual micro-inverters for that very purpose. Strings typically bring the whole group down with a single fault, sometimes even a single line of cells on one panel blocked by an object like leaves or snow. Are you planning to feed DC to the battery bank? In any kind of grouped system you won't easily be able to isolate the bad unit, and you'll have more troubleshooting on your hands.

On the micro inverter setup, we can normally tell the difference between an inverter fault and a panel fault pretty easily (though I don't know the specifics, my old man just tells me we have a panel or an inverter to replace). That 1-2 per year figure includes both panels and inverter replacements. If I had to guess, I'd say inverter is the more common point of failure, but we've had several panels go out as well. Since you're buying second hand, I'd anticipate it happening occasionally.

 

[Ox]

Pete - your app at camp maybe?


-----------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

 

[Conrad Hoffman]

Here in southern ontario we can choose to be on "Time of Use" or "Tiered" pricing. I have chosen to stay on tiered pricing. First 900kW/h is $0.087, all use after that is $0.103

We have a connection fee and regulatory charges as well:
Rural delivery fee: $90.76
Regulatory charges: $8.52
Ontario energy rebate: -$33.15

Our latest bill was $287 for 1,927 kWh

Worth noting our heating costs are not included in that because it's propane. Propane prices here are high, about $0.849 / liter. I just installed a heat-pump into our central air handler so we can avoid paying for propane and also avoid those direct Co2 emissions. Looks like it will cost us about $85/month in electricity to heat the house with the heat pump, as opposed to about ~$160/month when heating with propane. The heat pump was $8,200 fully installed. (36,000 BTU Bosch Inverter heat pump)

I am looking forward to when the solar is all installed and our electricity becomes 'free'!

Doesn't matter where the money goes, just that it comes out of your pocket, so you're paying just under $0.15/kWh.

 

[BoxcarPete]

Pete - your app at camp maybe?


-----------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

Yeah, sorta. It's at our family's property up in the northern lower peninsula. Not really a "camp" per se, but otherwise the right idea.

 

[Booze Daily]

Does that make you a Looper?

 

[CarbideBob]

Does that make you a Looper?

In Michigan this makes you a "troll" as you live below the bridge.
My biggest power draws are the vent system followed by the air compressors.... Strange.

 

[BoxcarPete]

In Michigan this makes you a "troll" as you live below the bridge.
My biggest power draws are the vent system followed by the air compressors.... Strange.

As much as I would love to have a place above the bridge, it's far enough away that it becomes out of range for small children. Fun facts: the western tip of da UP is farther west than St Louis, and takes longer to drive to from Metro Detroit to Copper Harbor than it does to get to Philadelphia or Nashville.

Edit to add: another benefit of having a place an hour south of the bridge is that it makes a great place to drop off the dog and cut the trip in half when you do get a chance to go up there.

 

[William Payne]

I have 3 phase power at my house in a residential neighbourhood in New Zealand to run my shop in behind my house.

I pay just under a dollar a day fixed daily charge and my per kilowatt charge is 27 cents per unit.

So in American money that would be 63 cents fixed per day plus 17 cents per kilowatt.

What do you guys pay?

 

[Ox]

I think that we are at $.12 or so here, for single phase - farm / co-op.
(I have only actually seen a cpl of bills in the last cpl decades, so ...)

IDK if there is any adders like you guys?
But my volume is high enough that any mins would be moot anyhow.


----------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox