this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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I’ve got solar panels and AC. I’m keeping the house at meat locker freezing while staying within the solar panel production. Might as well use the power when it’s there.
Some people will complain about using AC in general. They can sweat all they want - I’m keeping cool.
ngl, this is my lifelong goal. Have a house and being able to install and own green technology. Too bad that's mostly out of reach for anyone born in the 90's.
Can't sell your excess power to the grid?
They're making that increasingly difficult. Basically, as more and more people get solar it becomes economically impossible to maintain the grid with millions of people being paid to connect to it.
The result is a higher and higher percentage of your power bill not be for "use" but for some other bullshit.
Because of the crazy power rate spikes during one of the Texas freezes, my power bill gets like a bunch added to it as a recovery fee for like the next 15 years. Then there's the connection fee, maintenance fee, etc. My bill is like $300-400 a month before the first milliwatt is calculated, which makes solar less-viable. I'm paying a huge power bill no matter what (illegal to disconnect from the grid entirely), so payments towards a $50,000 solar setup would just make it more expensive.
I might save 20-40 bucks on my electric bill, but the extra $250 in payments for solar would kill that.
Yeah that's been an anticipated problem, since home solar is essentially a lost customer for the utility, but infrastructure maintenance costs don't change. Honestly the power grid shouldn't be a commercial enterprise, even if it's under shit tons of regulation. It's so absurdly critical to society we should have nationalized the power companies a long time ago.
Yeah... Right now California residents are paying massively inflated rates because the utility board decided that PG&E, a company that is literally a convicted killer, can pass the cost of the fines on to customers.
Yeah, if it’s a problem that our power grid is having distributed green energy connected all over the place, we need to make the damn utilities change.
Kind of like our railroads? Or the internet?
Here in the Netherlands, the panels are wired into the grid so you’re always delivering back and not using that power directly. What happens is, they basically deduct the power generated from the power you’ve used. This crediting system will eventually disappear, as too many people are feeding back solar power.
For all intents and purposes, as long as we generate more than we use, we’re paying nothing except grid charges and taxes. So if you’ve got a low energy use day and plenty of solar, there’s really no reason not to run an AC (or a washer/dryer, etc)
How big is your solar panel set up? I’ve been thinking of getting one of those solar generators, the smaller ones, and just using as much a/c as I can power with that. It probably wouldn’t last too long, right? I’d need a bigger set up?
You'd be surprised. A little window rattler AC could be powered by such a setup - ie I have a 1.6kw cooling A/C with an input rating of 490W, I've measured it to be around that. That will cool a bedroom somewhat. The issue will be the surge power when the compressor kicks in, so maybe add 50%.
We’ve got nine panels on the south facing roof. Right now, reasonably sunny day, they produce about 3.6 -3.7 Kw. That amply covers the power consumption of one of the two LG aircons we have. Those take about 2.5 kW. We usually just run one, depending on outside temp.
I’m not really familiar with solar generators in general, but that feels like you’d need a pretty beefy one to keep an AC powered.
a solar/battery setup large enough to run a whole house A/C for a reasonable amount of time (days in the case of a major power outage) would cost tens of thousands of dollars.
a generator powered by some type of gas (LPG/CNG) or diesel would probably be a lot more practical.
If everyone had solar panels and thought like you, we'd still have globe warming
Energy is heat. There's no such thing as cold, just lack of heat.
Trapping sun rays then releasing hot air warms the planet. That's what your system is doing. Removing heat from your house and putting it outside while your electric motor throws out extra heat.
It just doesn't have the air pollution that burning coal or gas does.
I am, in fact, quite aware of how air conditioners work :D A lot of devices work like this; it’s why a refrigerator and freezer generate heat. And why things like a slushy machine are real power hogs. Basically, anything that gets things cool will generate heat elsewhere.
Thing is, a refrigerator and freezer are very much needed in daily life. An air conditioner thankfully isn’t - yet. But on days where we have 25+ celsius, the aircon is the difference between being sweaty, irritable, unproductive and with poor sleep or… perfectly comfortable. So, we choose to not be miserable. It keeps me sane during heatwaves.
But yes, absolutely nobody should own one. And I highly encourage everybody else not to get one. I’m keeping mine though.
That light was already going to turn into heat. That's where basically everything but nuclear power came from.
Unless you have actual, credible researched math on the climate impact we're all going to ignore you.
https://wmo.int/suns-impact-earth#:~:text=In%20total%20approximately%2070%25%20of,Sun%20because%20it%20is%20colder.
No, the energy captured by solar panels wasn't already going to turn into heat to be released and trapped by earth's atmosphere.
That's ok as long as your solar panels also provide all your needs so you don't have to put load on the grid that could be put on your solar setup otherwise (if you're in a sector that's currently under alert).