Johnnojack said:
You might pay 1/2 or 1/3 of his service charge plus metered power you use, win win.
No, not going to work for me. I have 3 phase, they don't. We run our office from the back of our house as well.
When we get to the farm that's fully off-grid from day one, but that's a whole different story. Anyway I do have generator in fact I have 4 of them of different sizes ranging from a baby 1KVA to reasonable sized one at 145KVA, and no that's not a mistake.
I design and install off-grid and hybrid systems. It one of my favourite types of work. Our home system is currently 8.2kW's PV AC-coupled, Selectronics 7.5kW battery inverter, 1000AH battery bank, etc.
It's, more I give them power when there's a long blackout. However the fact is the grid is cheaper ATM than running a generator. Even with the service/quarterly connection charges, generator service can cost more than the annual connection charges, not to mention one has to buy it in the first place, which is often forgotten about. Lets say a generator costs $5500 delivered, that's roughly 12 years of service charges at todays charges, without even starting it. Then you still have to service it, replace the starter battery in that time at least once, pay for fuel, replace air/oil filters, etc.
One may not like the grid but it does or can have a useful place, it's just taking the distributors a while to wake up. Tesla's battery has scared the crap out them, and there starting to wake up to the fact they had better play in the sand pit with the rest of use or things could go very poorly for them.
We export excess power when we don't use or need it.
Posted Thursday 21 May 2015 @ 11:49:20 am from IP
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