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For a summer home in SW Washington I wonder if off-grid is practical. Approximately 140 days a year are considered "sunny' mostly summer. Electricity would be 2000 ft away..
How is storage? Can enough be stored during winter to help with summer usage? We are talking two people two dogs maybe 1200 sq ft. The house would be on a moutain/hill maybe 700 ft above sea level.
It seems the options get better/ cheaper each year..
I have a off-grid home on the east slopes of the Cascades. It has been going for 20 years now.
There is no way that you can store enough energy during the summer months to carry you through winter.
From March 21st through October 15th I generate enough power to run the house strictly on solar.
The rest of the year the generator runs pretty much every couple of days.
My "green, solar house" generates much more carbon emissions due to propane and wood to heat the home than a totally electric grid connected house in Chelan County.
Solar works for the space station and off-grid applications. Otherwise, it is pretty much a scam.
But I wouldn't trade my off-grid house for a grid connected home. As they say location, location, location. If it is a special location, accept the carbon trade-off and build the solar house anyway.
At this point...you can't store significant amounts of energy with batteries for home use.
Lifestyle?? How many electrical toys?? Are you going to be pumping water from a well??
It is fairly easy to have a solar system through the summer in the Northwest. Probably even in western Washington. The long days make all the difference in the world.
At the turn of the century there was a great book on a off-grid house. I can't remember the title, but worth finding. It was published in California out of Hopland?? Worth finding.
If your just doing summer...go for it.
I run a two-bedroom, two bath home on a 1.5 Kw system. Like I said totally solar from March through mid-October.
But I have lived in rural areas and pretty conscious of energy use. Anyway, doable for summer months if your willing to be careful with your use of energy.
For a summer home in SW Washington I wonder if off-grid is practical. Approximately 140 days a year are considered "sunny' mostly summer. Electricity would be 2000 ft away..
How is storage? Can enough be stored during winter to help with summer usage? We are talking two people two dogs maybe 1200 sq ft. The house would be on a moutain/hill maybe 700 ft above sea level.
It seems the options get better/ cheaper each year..
Where exactly? If you are talking Portland/Vancouver area, yes, an off-grid summer home will work. Plenty of solar gain in the summer. Closer to the coast, it will be trickier and require specialized engineering, which may not be cost-effective for your purposes. Google “passive annual heat storage homes”.
If you're only there in the summer, just generate the juice at that time. To generate electricity in the winter for use in the summer, you would have a storage problem, like- where are you going to store all the batteries that would be required?
Clouds make a huge difference in solar energy matters. A few yrs ago, I made a 6' x 5' passive solar heater as an experiment. On a cold winter day in Chicago (outside temp 2degF) with cloudless sky, the air coming out of the panel would be 105degF (!). But the next day, as just a few puffy cumulus clouds appeared and temps rose to 20deg, generated air temp fell to 30-ish, and then as the next front moved in and covered the sky with clouds and temps outside rose to 30s, no heat was captured at all.
That info can be extrapolated to PV effect generally speaking....studies show that in areas outside the Sunbelt, solar installations only average about 1/3rd the "boiler plate" generation capacity. It's just a matter of sizing your installation appropriately for your location.
Living on solar power is a big shift in lifestyle. It is not good for heating or cooking, but it is good for lighting, fans and computers.
On sunny days our battery bank can be fully charged by noon. On those days, we have surplus power to run all our home appliances and all my power tools.
As soon as the sun sets, or on cloudy days, we must be very careful of what gets turned on.
We live in a state that is over 92% forest, most homes in our area all burn firewood for home heating. We heat with wood and we get a little heat from solar thermal panels.
You should check with local solar companies. They will have operational data for your ara and can tell you how much energy you can expect to get from your panels. Just a caution solar panels are degraded when exposed to sunlight but sitting open circuited. You'll want to leave some loads connected in the winter so that something will absorb the energy.
"I wonder if off-grid is practical."
this depends upon your practice.
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