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EHH week 33: energy monitor

This house is aiming to be a net zero energy dwelling.  In order to reach that ambitious goal, the homeowners will need to carefully manage their energy usage throughout the course of the year.

 

Reading the main utility meter only tells the total electricity consumed.  But if it is running high, they need to know where exactly the power is going.  Is it the hair dryer?  Are the garage door openers on standby?

 

There are several inexpensive ($100) energy monitors on the market, which in my view are worth little more than saving a trip outside to read the meter on the wall.  There are also a number of fancy and expensive ($10,000) energy monitoring systems with flat screen displays and all sorts of information intended for the lobbies of office buildings or high schools. 

 

So I was delighted to turn up a small local company called Converged Green that provides an affordable device that can monitor every single circuit in the house and lets us customize how we log and display it.  Best of all, it only draws 5 watts of power so it does not waste energy saving energy!

 

The electricity is measured using current transducers (CTs), which are little metal donuts that encircle the hot wire of each circuit in the electrical panel.  Each piece of equipment (range hood, water heater, etc) has its own dedicated circuit anyway.  But we had to instruct the electrician to group lighting on lighting-only circuits so that we get pure readings for each category.

 

EHH week 23: PV system

With the array rack in place, it was time to install the PV panels.  Each one is 4 feet by 4 feet and secured to a special stairstep bracket that allows air to pass around it to help keep it cool.  Ironically, the hotter the panels are, the less power they generate.  The bracket also provides a nifty chase for the wiring that runs from the back of each panel.  The brackets are bolted to aluminum rails which in turn are bolted to the steel pipe rack.  Simple.

 

The panels are Silicon Energy Cascade SiE195, made about an hour away in Marysville, Washington.  They arrive in tidy flat stacks and are absolutely gorgeous.  They have no aluminum frame like most PV panels.  And they don’t have a white PVC backing, so they look great from below, which is how the homeowners will see them.  The cells are spaced apart a little bit, so you can actually see the sky through the glass gaps.

 

The electricity they generate is fed to two DC to AC inverters, SMA America Sunny Boy 8000-US (grey), which send electrons to the utility grid and to four AC to DC inverters, Sunny Island 5048-US (yellow).  The yellow inverters charge the 24 on-site sealed-lead-acid batteries, Sun Xtender PVX-12150HT, that live in cabinets in the garage.  If the power grid goes out, like it did for 300,000 people during a blizzard a few weeks ago in January 2012, the batteries can keep this house humming along.