 Hey, and Lohan, welcome to another exciting Stand the Energy Man show on Think Tech Hawaii, where our goal is to share pertinent information with our community to help you make informed decisions. Today's show blends a little bit of sociology with energy. The sociology aspect was the inspiration. As I pondered the question, why is it that so many people hesitate to migrate off the grid? So I'll start with a story that I think explains it. A few years ago, I was invited to be on a panel to brief the benefits of hydrogen technology regarding a sustainable grid. There are five or six of us on the panel, some from industry, one from government, two from environmental groups, and one individual that I just couldn't figure out where he fit. This individual basically had nothing in his background that I could see that would give him credibility to speak about new technology and a sustainable grid. Well, to make a long story short, it turns out that that's the very reason he was there. He was there to pitch a story that the average individual had no business migrating away from the grid in the electric company, and he was there to testify about the terrifying experience he and his family endured trying to go off grid. I'm not certain who invited this individual to participate in the panel, but it seems like the only organization that benefited from him sharing his story was the electric utility company. Imagine that. He started by saying how he was inspired by stories of bold homesteaders defecting from the grid and living a blissful life of independence, no longer dependent on electricity generated from fossil fuels, and then being pushed through miles of wire and modulated by transformers and substations. He spun a wonderful story about how he and his wife and his children were looking forward to doing their share to keep our planet clean and healthy and yet still enjoy the comforts of modern electricity and electric appliances they've come to love. But his story quickly degenerated into a litany of mishaps, miscalculations, and near disasters that actually put his family's health and safety at risk and drove him to the conclusion that the average citizen should never try to defect from the electric utility grid. I really wasn't expecting the kind of story he told, but I must say I wasn't surprised that the only monopoly on the panel, the electric company, would plant somebody to reinforce what many big businesses market, which is that the average human being is not professional or competent enough to provide the service that these companies do. Things like electrical power should be left to the professionals like the electric company. So if you've been around as long as Stan the Energy Man has, you recognize this pattern. It's often marketed by monopolies, technical industries, unions, certain professions, even religions and bureaucracies. The concept of regular citizens educated in a public school and maybe having job required skills or talents that are far removed from these other professions could actually possess enough brain cells to master more than one profession is totally foreign to many of these elitists. They just don't see how the average citizen can do anything other than their regular job. So how can a school teacher be a pilot and pilot an airplane? How can a financial analyst come up with a cure for a disease? How can a farmer build and operate and maintain an electrical system in his home and maybe even across his farm? For the elites, they can't see it, but I guess I can. I guess it's just a form of job security for people who think that unless you have a degree from a university and a specific major, you have no business venturing into that field on your own. But I guess I've never subscribed to that mentally. I've always felt that if you have the desire and are committed to spending the time to study and learn from books, from experts, and maybe even the internet, there are very few things that the average American couldn't accomplish in this day and age. So let's start by saying that standard energy man has a degree in fine arts and a master's in international relations stacked on top of a public high school education. So I'm not exactly an elitist. But when most people read my resume, they sit in disbelief of my work experience, my military background, and the personal and professional accomplishments I've made. Yet I assure you, I'm just an average human, you will never see my name associated with the latest breakthrough in quantum physics or advanced mathematics or plasma thrusters and spacecraft. But I can assure you that with a little help from my friends, I can build a house that's off the grid. So let's get to the real meat of this discussion. You may think that being off the grid is exceptionally complex, but it's not. I'm not saying that in 20 seconds, you could flip through a brochure and have it all figured out. But with a little bit of thought and study and sound advice from professional or to taking your house off the grid and learning to maintain it and operate that system is not beyond your reach. Let's start off by talking about the basic components involved in this process. First of all, you need some source of energy. And today, the most common source of energy is the sun using photovoltaic panels that capture the sun's energy and turn it into direct current or DC electricity. But you can also use wind power to develop DC electricity. Or if you live near a stream or a river like many people in Alaska do, that flowing water can be used to create hydroelectric power, also DC electricity. So let's call this your primary source of power. But all three of these primary sources of power are intermittent. Even the stream or the river changes its current from time to time. They fluctuate. So sometimes they're there and sometimes they're not. Sometimes it's strong and sometimes they're weak. So you need a second component so you can store up that primary energy and provide a constant, steady flow of power to your system or to your home. This job generally goes to batteries and the batteries management system that comes with the batteries and it's designed to work with your particular battery arrangement. In other words, your battery management system is designed to function exactly with the batteries that you're buying from the battery manufacturer. So you'll want to get those two components together. The third component you need is an inverter to take your smooth direct current, your DC power that comes from all your solar or wind or your hydroelectrics and power your batteries and turn it into alternating current, which is commonly used in household appliances. Specifically, typical American household runs on 110 or 220 volt alternating current. And finally, you need a distribution system in your house. It has built-in protection from overload, short circuits, and ground faults, things like that. But this is a component that's no different than the one used in your house today to handle the power from the electric utility. So that fourth piece is probably already built into your house. So these are your basic off-the-grid systems, photovoltaics, a battery with a controller, inverters to change it to AC power and a distribution system. Four things. I think you can keep track of four things. These are all commercially available. And if you understand what your house really needs for you to power, you should be well equipped to talk to a professional that can help you design the perfect system for your needs. A couple of other things to consider would be make sure you're planning for future needs. If you're going to buy a Tesla and you're going to have to charge that Tesla off your solar panels, you better include that power into your calculations. If you plan to expand your house or to bring more appliances in, you better be ready to do that because it will change the calculations that you set up in your system. And it's always better to start off with those expected currents and expected draws on your power system to plan that up front and be able to just modify your system to use it instead of replacing entire components because they were the wrong ones for a bigger system. So we'll talk about that next. You also might want to consider a secondary power source like a generator or a fuel cell that can cover outages of longer duration than your batteries generally could. So let's get into the nuts and bolts of how to come up with the numbers you need when you talk to a professional that will help you design your system. First of all, I tell people that before you design the electric system, they need to start with efficiency. So I would recommend looking at LED lighting throughout your house and even look at things like going with propane appliances instead of electric appliances that can relieve much of the power burden from your new grid. For example, the three biggest electric suckers in your house are the water heater, the clothes dryer, and the electric range and oven. Taking these three appliances off of your electric load and turning them into gas appliances provides two benefits. Number one, you lose use less power, obviously, but you also get redundancy or maybe more accurately resiliency in an emergency. So if you have a major storm or something in your solar panels, some of them get blown away, you can still run off of propane and natural gas. By the way, propane and natural gas prices are projected to remain fairly low for at least another decade or so. And you can get a dual fuel emergency generator for under $1000 at any one of the big box stores, Home Depot, Lowe's, Costco, Sam's Club, or even on Amazon. And those generators could be used using gasoline or propane. And when you have one, you could either be charging your batteries to run your house on its existing system, or you could take the generator and plug it right into your AC alternating current system and power some of the circuits in your house to keep you going even after a storm. So if you think about those kind of add ins after your basic system, you can actually have a pretty good comfort level with your ability to keep your power going and survive even after a critical storm. So what I'm going to do now is show you a basic chart that talks about how much alternating current electrical power, typical houses and appliance household appliances use to understand the needs and help this will help you understand your needs and help you manage your system. This chart, and many like it are available on the internet, and are usually actually posted right on the box of the generator, the backup generator you might want to buy to help you decide if that generator will support your needs. And it really only has two components. These charts are very, very simple. The two components to consider are the number of watts required to get your equipment started, and the number of watts required to keep the equipment operating. That's it. So if you look at this chart, you'll notice that things like air conditioners and water heaters and clothes dryers draw a lot of power. But let's take a really close look. It's not only just how much power do they draw. But what's their startup power? The electric water heater has a pretty high power draw. But it really doesn't have any kind of startup surge. Kind of like a light bulb. You turn it on, it's on. So but if you look at your air conditioner, an air conditioner, for example, whether it's a window air conditioner or a big central system, or maybe even your refrigerator, those systems require a significant amount of power to run. But they also require sometimes even twice the amount of power to get started. So if you bought a generator powerful enough to run your air conditioner, but not powerful enough to get it started, your system simply won't function. You have to be able to generate enough power to start your appliances up and also to keep them running. So we're going to take a quick break now. And when we come back from the break, I'm going to talk a little bit more about this chart. And we'll look at some of the actual draw from appliances. And we'll talk about some of the things you have to think about as you design your system for off the grid living. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of think tech Hawaii's law across the sea program. Being a lawyer has many aspects and I try to cover them every time I do a program of law across the sea. Not everything has to do with law or being a lawyer per se. Some of it has to do with the people you meet, the things you see, the places you visit. And that's what I try to combine in think tech Hawaii's law across the sea. Thank you for watching Aloha. Hello and welcome back to Stanley Englishman here on think tech Hawaii. So we've been talking about going off the grid with your house. Let me recap just a little bit. Really there's four basic things that you need to start looking at when you can want to consider going off the grid. Number one is your power source, which let's just say for the sake of example, solar panels, you need to figure out how many solar panels you need. So you need some information. The next piece you need is a place to store energy because the sun's not always shining. And at night you need to still be able to run your house. So you need some storage. And that will use batteries and the batteries. There's all different kind of batteries. I personally recommend lithium ferrous phosphate batteries, which are much more stable than lithium cobalt. They're a little heavier. They're a little more expensive. But they're worth seeking out several companies make them. Sony designed some outstanding batteries and that company was their technology was sold to a company called Marata. But I think Panasonic and several other big companies also make lithium fossil iron phosphate batteries. They're exceptional. So you've got solar panels, you've got batteries in the controller that goes to to keep the batteries charged properly and don't let them overcharge. And then you have something called an inverter. And the inverter takes all that direct current power that you're getting from your solar panels or your wind turbine or your hydroelectric plant and turns it into alternating current power, which follows a sine wave. And it's the kind of electricity that your appliances need in your house. So there's two different kinds of electricity we're dealing with here. And the inverter is the one that takes your DC and turns it into AC power. And then the last thing is the basic circuitry in your house that should already be there. It's no different than what you have when you're working with the grid, and it delivers powers throughout your house and has things like circuit breakers or fuses, things built into it so that you can't run too much power through too thin of a wire and cause an overheating problem or a fire or cause it'll disconnect from short circuits and things like that. So only four things, the power, the battery with a controller, the inverters, and then your power distribution system. Those are the four things you need in your house. The bonus things would be maybe a backup generator so that you can have backup power either AC or DC. You can charge your batteries with a backup generator or you can run a lot of the stuff in your house directly from a generator. And so you need to know if you want to get a backup generator how big that might have to be. So those are the four basic things that you need. And then I talked about a chart and the chart would talk, we're talking about how much do you really use. So let's take a look at this list and see if there's some conclusions we can come to. And for homework, because I couldn't give you a heads up before the show to dig up your electric bill and see how many kilowatt hours you use, I'm going to give you some homework. Go dig up your phone bill sometime and look at it for how many kilowatt hours you use per day. I know that my house uses between 18 and a half and 22 kilowatt hours per day. Here in Hawaii, that's probably a little on the low side, but not unusual for a single family home. This number gives you a good idea of how many solar panels you'll need to begin with, and how much battery storage you also need. But also kind of puts your head in a ballpark place where you can look at that average daily draw of power. And if you start to come up with numbers that are way outside of that, but you know your house runs on it right now, you know that something's wrong with your math and you have to go back and check it. So always look at your electric bill and look at how many kilowatt hours of power that you use per day. So let's take a closer look at the chart and talk about some of your appliances, when they would be used and which appliances may be running at the same time to help you determine your peak load requirements. And we'll pull several examples from the chart and talk about multiple appliances running, starting at the same time, etc. So as a recap, we'll start with your electric bill and chart all your appliances realistically, map out what your peak draw would be for your heavy loads, if they all kicked in at once, and then take your average loads and look and make sure that they seem to balance out with how much your house uses on a daily basis right now. In particular, you have to look at the early morning and dinner time use. Those times of the day are usually when a household demands will peak when you're getting ready for work and getting the family ready to leave. And then in the evening when you're coming back cooking dinner, watching TV, maybe working on your computer and things like that. The utilities call this the duck curve. So if you want to throw that term around with your utility buddies, feel free. But it's basically the two peaks during the day that that utilities have to deal with where they have the biggest draw in power, and have the least amount of production. We're in the middle of the day, they got lots of production and not as much draw. So I venture to say that unless you own three Teslas and drive an awful lot, or if you run a welding and metal fabrication shop out of your garage, that five to seven kilowatts of photovoltaics and about a 16 kilowatt hour battery would would be suitable with a good controller and inverters to be in the ballpark for the typical Hawaiian family for sure. Now if you live in the Northeast or you live in a real cold climate or place with real short days, or you live in a valley where you don't get as much sunlight, you're gonna have to really tweak your solar voltaic panels and stuff. But that's what you're professionals for to help you with the local climate variations. How much sun your panels get in a typical day and how efficient you are operating your home can make a significant impact. But I'm convinced that the average person and a competent solar electric company can get you off the grid with a world of competence. So let's look at that chart. Let's talk about some of the things on the chart, point some things out. First off, if you look at the three columns, one is just the first column is just the kind of appliance. The second column is your operating load. And it's all in watts. So we can talk about watts, which are like one watt or kilowatts, which is 1000 watts. So like the first thing up there is an air conditioner. It's 3250 watts. That's 3.25 kilowatts. And but look at how much the startup load is 7200 watts. That's a lot. Look right underneath. There's a coffee maker. Doesn't take a whole lot between 800 and 1500 watts of running time of running a draw. But it doesn't have any surge at the beginning. It's just heating water. So you just put the power to a heating coil and it slowly heats up. But it doesn't have any big inrush of power like your air conditioner does right above it. But let's focus on that middle column for a second. What are the big draw items in there? Well, the first one air conditioner sure is a big draw item at 3250 watts. And as you go down, you see what's the next big one? Maybe a toaster oven, which is between 1000 and 1600. Vacuum cleaner actually pulls a little bit between 800 and 1500. But you get down to water heater or water pumps if you have to have to pump your water because you don't have enough pressure. Look at that water heater constantly running and heating water 3000 to 4500 watts of power all the time. But like I said, some of these things don't have much of a peak draw and some of them do. So what do you have to actually do? Sit down and think about it. How often do you need to run your air conditioner at what temperature? You know, do you only need to run it when you're home? Maybe just before you get home to be cool when you get home in the summer evening. So you have to look at that and say, does my system handle number one, that big inrush of 77200 watts of power to get my air conditioner system, a compressor going and then the 3250 watts to keep it going. And at the same time, am I going to be making coffee? Probably not deep fire. Maybe when I'm making dinner, electric fan, maybe if it's hot, my air conditioner is not working. But that's another point. Maybe an electric fan works and it sure saves a lot more energy than that air conditioner. So as we go down the list, when we look at other components, we look at things like that light bulb. And you notice it says light bulb standard and it says as stated, what that means is if you have a 60 watt light bulb, it uses 60 watts. If you have a 100 watt light bulb, it uses 100 watts. So depending on what size light bulbs you have in all your fixtures, you can actually go around and calculate it. So the idea is to sit down and say, okay, during the times when I use the most electricity, like in the morning or in the evening when I come home, what are the things that will be running all the time or I'll be using a lot. And you add up those wattages and come up with maybe come up with 6,800 watts that you're going to use at those peak times. So you calculate how much photovoltaics you need, how big a battery you need. And if you're going to have a backup generator, how big a generator you need to cover that 6,800 watts. Because you know that if you have a 7,000 watt generator, it's going to be able to cover all that. But you also have to know how much of a surge you're going to get when certain appliances kick in. Like if you're in the middle of that 6,800 maybe maybe you're only even at 5,000 watts or 5,500 watts of usage, but all of a sudden your air conditioner kicks on and now you're throwing 7,000 something watts into the mix. You're going to over task your system. So you really have to just think about those two components. How much do I need to run my equipment that I expect to run at my peak times? And what are those surges going to mean when they if they kick in while in a peak time? That's what the electric company does. They sit there and they have a thing called spinning reserve, which means they have an extra generator running all the time just in case for the silly example everybody flushes their toilet all at once. Everybody turns their air conditioner on all at once and all of a sudden they get this huge surge requirement for power. They have a generator always running that they can ramp up to full speed to make sure that their grid doesn't get impacted just like you would have to worry about it at home. But you don't need to if you think about your system and you build a little extra power cushion in there to make sure you can handle the surges while you're at your peak time that morning and evening time on your duck curve. You pretty much got it wired. Now in the worst-case scenario you'll probably blow a circuit breaker it'll trip off your your system and you have to go reset it. But if you do a good job designing your system with your local photovoltaics folks and don't be cheap on the components by good components and make sure you have enough power generation especially as you add things to your house and educate your family. Make sure that they're not leaving a whole bunch of lights on during the peak time when you're also trying to cook food, run a microwave, run your computer and things like that. But take a good long look at that chart and really become energy aware. If you remember a couple, sometimes middle of last year I had a gentleman professor from I think Michigan who named Huggins and he was talking about energy blindness. And energy blindness is basically most people use electricity have no idea how much their hair dryer uses or how much your electric toothbrush uses or how much their toaster uses. Look at that chart really carefully. Don't be energy blind. Learn how much your appliances use and then build your system at home smart. And I'm sure that the average person can build off the grid, be completely safe, have a system in the last 15-20 years with decent maintenance and you won't be paying electric bill. If you're really good you may make it hydrogen also from your system and putting it in your hydrogen fuel cell car then you're not paying for gas either. So that's your off-the-grid advice from Stan Energy Man and I hope that it helps and I hope that you can look at those numbers, do a little math yourself, talk to a solar professional and go off the grid. It's not scary at all. Trust me. Allah ha!