It has been a while since I have written anything ... anything at all!
We have now been in the house for nearly 5 years, we have made a few changes to the solar system and gas use.
The Solar system as you will recall is 3.2kW with batteries and we were off grid (not connected to the main national grid). It was designed around a 3 to 4 day storm cycle and low use.
2021 was not a great year weather wise and it showed us some of the limits of the system we had installed, particularly around longer storm cycles. We had a few nights where we turned off the fridge freezer and had candle lit dinners.
I had a gut feeling that power was being wasted somewhere and I could not work that out. So we contacted the designer of the system and supplier of the inverter. I thought we should have more power than we were getting. There was an issue with the inverter which was fixed but we still appeared short.
Then we got some bad news about the gearbox in the car, so it was time to consider upgrading the car. Part of that particular debate was do we go to an EV or hybrid or stay with an ICE car? Would we have enough power to charge an EV or hybrid? What would we take to charge an EV or Hybrid?
Both issues of the solar system output and the car clashed, after lots of research and discussion we kicked of the plan ... lets upgrade the inverter, connect to the grid and buy a Hybrid!
We contacted Colin White at Glenn Roberts Electrical, they upgraded the inverter and connected us to the grid. This means we could feed our surplus power into the main national grid and when we required extra power we could buy that. It also proved the point that we were producing a lot more power than we were using (even after charging our car)!
By doing this what surplus we make during the spring/summer/autumn period covers the extra we need during the winter months. We end up making a little profit at the end of the year 😀 We did away with the generator which also reduced our costs and footprint
Going forward we will add some additional panels to the roof.
The second change we did, was triggered by the gas company putting the rental up of the 45 kg bottles. We use gas for cooking and in winter for boosting the hot water.
Knowing now we had surplus power to use, we started to boost the hot water through winter with electricity rather than gas. this means we could go away from renting the big 45 kg bottles and use 9 kg bottles. Our gas use went from about 80 kg to 27 kg a year, not only saving money but reducing our emissions too from approx., 270 kg/pa to 87 kg/pa, a solid reduction! The dollar savings were good too approx., $200 pa.
We are working on our water usage and will write something about that as it becomes an issue going forward.
The third change was to choose a vehicle, what a headache this was, so much information out there to sift through. In the end it comes down to what use does your vehicle do? Long trips versus short trips? do you tow? do you need a 4WD? What sort of charging network is available nearby or where you intend to travel?
Fortunately, I had a pretty good idea of the distance we travel each year (15 to 16000 km), that we tend to do two large road trips (2500 km ea) a few trips to Christchurch (900 km return) each year, the odd trip to Nelson Lakes or across to Golden Bay, the rest of our trips were local maybe 15 km each.
The second aspect was there were not a great charging network around the South Island at the time of purchasing (it is getting better).
With all this in mind we purchased a plug in hybrid (PHEV), we can plug it in at home (just a standard socket), the power is free 😁 it either charges from the house batteries or from the solar panels! We are getting approx., 50 kms from the single charge which is about two to three trips into town and back, the longest we went without putting fuel in it was about 11 weeks (prior to buying it we were spending about $100 a week on fuel). I estimate that 60 to 70% of our motoring is local. On the open road it is also surprisingly economical, averaging on petrol only 19.7 km/l (5.1 litres per 100km).
This has all helped with reducing our travel emissions, we try not to fly rather take an extra day to travel.
this shows our reduction in carbon emissions since 1 April 2017, certainly not flying and not being self employed helps!
Like anything you learn new things and refine as we go along, while there is very little I would change on the house design, if we were to build again I would forget the gas altogether and put in as much solar PV as I could afford, I would still keep the solar evacuated tube system for the hot water, these are so efficient and we are getting over 300 days of hot water without having to boost it.
Overall our carbon footprint has come down since 2017, quite quickly initially and now it is refining tasks/actions to get minor gains.
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