NW-Bound
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2008
- Messages
- 35,712
As mentioned, it pays to know how much you use, in order to see how much you can cut back in the case of electric outage.
In my case, in the 30 years living at this address, I have had only one significant outage that lasted 4 hours, and it was due to a substation failure. I do not count short outages of a few seconds that were apparently caused when they were doing some power switching.
I was interested in the power usage when I was building and testing out my DIY solar system, and wanted to know how much of a dent it would make of my power bill.
And I found some interesting numbers, such as the 24-kWh/day minimum usage. I found that the main 32-c.f. fridge draws 4.8 kWh/day, while the smaller 26-c.f. fridge draws 1.6 kWh/day. The large fridge gets opened several times a day, and we use tons of ice out of it. The smaller fridge gets opened once or twice a day at most. I guess that just to keep the fridges going plus some minimal lighting plus the basic router+laptop usage will require 8-10 kWh/day.
My solar system has been cranking out 25 to 45 kWh/day, depending on the season. And I am still tweaking it.
In my case, in the 30 years living at this address, I have had only one significant outage that lasted 4 hours, and it was due to a substation failure. I do not count short outages of a few seconds that were apparently caused when they were doing some power switching.
I was interested in the power usage when I was building and testing out my DIY solar system, and wanted to know how much of a dent it would make of my power bill.
And I found some interesting numbers, such as the 24-kWh/day minimum usage. I found that the main 32-c.f. fridge draws 4.8 kWh/day, while the smaller 26-c.f. fridge draws 1.6 kWh/day. The large fridge gets opened several times a day, and we use tons of ice out of it. The smaller fridge gets opened once or twice a day at most. I guess that just to keep the fridges going plus some minimal lighting plus the basic router+laptop usage will require 8-10 kWh/day.
My solar system has been cranking out 25 to 45 kWh/day, depending on the season. And I am still tweaking it.
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