Off the Grid
Today is the winter Solstice and over the longest night we had a wild and blustery storm roll in bringing gusts that toppled trees onto power lines and shutting power off to about 10,000 people in our rural river valley. The irony of the lights going off on the coinciding with the darkest night here in the northern hemisphere did not escape me. All our community message boards were lit up with people anxiously asking if anyone around them has power, as if sitting with the dark and lack of electronic communication was too much to bear. So many people crying out into the dark, “anyone? Can you hear me? Please tell me it will all be ok and I will have all the perks of electricity back soon. How will I make coffee this morning?!”
Whenever this happens, I can’t help but smugly smile inwardly knowing that almost 2 decades ago set up the first grid tied, battery backup solar system in Oregon. So, when the power goes out, I don’t even notice and with Starlink, our internet is uninterrupted as well. Before establishing this homestead, which does had 200 amps of grid power available, I had lived on an off grid homestead nearby where we had to generate all of our electricity with solar panels and a micro-hydropower system which used falling water from a nearby steam to generate DC electricity 24/7. At that location we got our domestic water from a gravity water line fed from a mountain spring. The simple life to be sure, which certainly requires lots of hands-on maintenance but has the added benefit of the knowledge of how to do so. When I was establishing this farm, it felt like a step backwards to get back to on the grid living, however, we quickly became accustomed to all the electricity after years of having to ration ourselves based on if the sun is shining, or how much juice we had in our battery pack. We used to have a 1 light on per person rule to conserve electricity and decisions whether to do a load of laundry or run power tools were everyday occurrences.
So, when Oregon began offering cost-share programs to incentivize homeowners to install solar back in 2006, I jumped at the opportunity to achieve some degree of energy independence once again. We sold our diesel farm truck that we had been running on biodiesel to afford the upfront costs which made sense to us at the time. We still had an old beater farm truck. A new inverter had recently been invented which converts DC power to AC that had the technology to balance many power inputs and outputs such as solar, hydro and generator power in and home power and “net-metering” which is the term for selling power back to the grid. The solar installer joked that I was installing the most expensive flashlight in the world! The idea of the power going out when I had a solar system and having no power seemed absurd to me, but this is how most of the solar systems that you see on roofs are set up, with no battery backup whatsoever.
read more on Medium: https://medium.com/@dontipping/off-the-grid-9772277d18f9?sk=f1193fc9ca8c46fe05c719b109e3c482
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