Cooma house temperatures and power thoughts

[dalekboy]

Got to say, I'm pretty impressed with how our house goes in the heat. On any of the warmer days, say 30+, the temperature inside will sit anywhere between 4-6 degrees lower on average. But on the really hot days, like yesterday when it reached 40, at one point we were 11.5 degrees cooler inside than it was outside.

On many of the hot days I'll actually leave two or three windows open around an inch. The house heats up a little more than it would, naturally, but it helps drop the internal humidity down by a fair whack, stopping the house from feeling as muggy.

In other news, our first power bill was $60. Given that we haven't had the solar panels up all that long, that's not too bad. Bill would have been about $330 without. That said, $30 of of bill was GST. Yes, they charged us GST on the full amount of the bill, then took off the money from the power buyback. I thought that was a bit cheeky.

As far as I can tell, our power usage appears to be about 75-80% the NSW average. Not too bad, and that's before we've swapped out lights for lower power ones. Mind you, beyond that I'm not sure how much more we can do. Most of the equipment is turned off at the power point, and is usually only on when it's being used. That said, I do want to get the stove top shifted over to gas, and at some point we may look into solar for water heating. We currently have electric water heating but the unit can be converted to work with solar as well.

Given the way power costs are going up in NSW, may well look at building a shed to house batteries, and getting additional panels set up to take us off the grid. But that'd be a fair way off, for all sorts of reasons.

Will be interested to see how our power bills look in the winter. Less sunlight, more lights on. Hopefully the fire will save us some cash, and the house will continue to show how good its insulation is.

Comments

[dalekboy.livejournal.com]

I've seen a couple of sustainable houses that had their own battery banks.

Given how much electricity has been going up in NSW, and the fact that there are more rises set over the next couple of years, anything that cuts power bills is good.

Couple of recent things I found were people who had substantially cut their electricity usage and were still paying way more than they used to thanks to rises. I begrudge paying the bastards that charge people more for reducing their power usage. And some companies have started charging people who have solar cells more for any electricity they have to buy. I knew about this before we got the panels, and figured with our already low power usage we'd still be better off. Plus while I haven't done the math on the environmental impact behind the construction and installation of solar cells, I'm hoping it will reduce our carbon footprint a bit.

I don't think ours is one of the companies that charges the increased premiums.

[tikiwanderer.livejournal.com]

The math still holds up, generally. Particularly as the solar cells can reduce peak needs substantially, which means less need for power station infrastructure and lower cost on the transmission network infrastructure. Cost/enviro wise the most effective power I think is still wind, in Aus at least (where we have so little potential for hydro), but trying to do wind at the residential scale (i.e. individual household systems) is a bit problematic (urban areas tending to have chaotic and turbulent wind conditions). Solar PV doesn't have that problem so much, it doesn't make too much difference where the panels are so long as they're not shaded out. So you can put them right next to where your power's drawn with no reduction of power production.