Electricity - Day 154 - Daily Haiku

Electricity
easy to take for granted
until it is gone

In light of my last post, in which I photographed our unlit aquarium after the timer had doused its light for the evening, I thought it apropos to show the same aquarium, this time well lit, as a celebration of having working electricity once more. For this I am truly grateful.

After several days of increasing heat, during which we kept being promised rain and storms that never came, but continued skirting to our north (sorry, @enginewitty!), we awoke yesterday to a glorious thunderstorm, with the promise of more to come throughout the day.

And come they did. Though our morning storm quickly gave way to sunshine, by the time I returned from my appointment in Cookeville, a few minutes after 5 PM, I realized that our power was out.

I called my next-door neighbor, who cheerfully informed me that she was washing dishes by oil lamp, and that the power had gone out around forty minutes earlier, or around 4:30 PM. About ten minutes later I called our power co-op, who had yet to be informed of an outage in our area, and they promised to look into it, so I was glad I called.

They really are to be commended, because in the six years we have lived here, though power blips are annoyingly common, they typically only last for a matter of seconds, and only rarely last more than a minute or two.

Not this time, however. I fed and watered all the animals, brought in the goats, and puttered around with the plants on the front porch, and still we had no power. I was just starting to gather candles, and was wondering whether I should break out the Coleman lantern, when finally the power went back on at 8:20 PM.

Not quite four hours. A long time for us.

Which, naturally, made me think yet again about what will happen if and when the power stays off, and about our longstanding desire to get off the grid, permanently, and to provide our own power, becoming far more self-reliant in the process.

Our eastern border is formed by the Calfkiller River, which is spring fed and quite clean as modern rivers go, and we also have at least one year-round spring that traverses beneath our land, so small-scale hydropower is a possibility, and one that I fully intend to research far more in the near future.

Wind is less promising, both because of the proximity of our woods, and because of the propensity for birds and bats to fly into the turbine blades. Apparently, the area immediately behind the standard type of wind turbine becomes a low-pressure area, when the blades are in motion, and it messes with their navigational systems, with typically tragic consequences for the birds and bats.

So no. I'll hold out for a less potentially lethal power source, although we may play with a wind-scoop type turbine in the future, as those do not require the great height and stout tower of traditional wind turbines, and are by design far less deadly to wildlife.

Solar is an obvious contender, as Tennessee has ample sun all year. but our roof is positioned roughly north to south, rather than east to west, so rooftop solar is a no go, and it would have to be a standalone system. And the second house is too deeply shaded for solar to work well in summer, and since it is also a north-south orientation, pretty much a no go.

The only roof that is oriented east-west is our barn, which has the least need for electricity overall, though it would be convenient. But it has a massive tulip poplar that shades it heavily, so again, it may only really be feasible in the winter.

One possibility we have looked into is the Smart Solar Box, which is essentially a portable solar generator that you can tie into your electrical system.

I bought plans for it last year, and having gone over them it looks relatively simple to build, though tying into our home's electrical system I'll leave to our go-to heating and electrical guy, Al. I'll pass on electrocuting myself, thanks all the same. ;-)

So our basic plan at this point is to build the Smart Solar Box, get it operational, and then rather than tying into the grid, which can result in a whole host of issues, we'll initially have have Al isolate the electrical circuits for the refrigerator and air conditioning/heating system, and see if it is powerful enough to run those, or if we'll need a second system.

My educated guess is that we'll need two for each house, and one for the barn, but they could surprise me, as the info with the plans says that one unit is enough to run an average house. Time will tell, but in any case, I want our first one to be completed by fall, so that we can run some real world tests and see where we need to go from there.

This is one of those things that I am fine with doing in stages, as one of the potential uses I'd like to explore are to take it camping, and to see if it can be used as a primary power source for a tiny house or two, a shed, a garage, etc. There are a lot of possibilities.

Ultimately, I'm inclined to think that we will wind up using more than one solution in combination, in order to have redundant systems, so that we finally do get off the grid, it will be a relatively painless process.

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