This past year my wife and I finally got the solar array we had planned in. The questions I usually get asked are how much it cost, how much does it produce and what level of subsidy is there for it. First, here's what it looks like: The idea was to have something that produced enough power to offset our family's daily energy use. So I'll walk through how this worked out: The house consumes the Solar Array first. Anything left over goes back to DTE in wh...

I was reading on the forums today people complaining that even in a post-civilization world (one where people are basically getting together from the ruins) that they would “know” how to do all kinds of things like make bows, swords, etc. I have a lot of friends who are active in the Renaissance and Medieval communities out there who always laugh at this kind of thing. The conversation goes something like this: “Really, you think you can make a spear? Ok. Let’s see you do it. Let’s see...

  If you’re looking for a non-politicized (just the facts) site for global temperatures here’s a good one: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ All it does is use the NOAA satellite data to measure the atmospheric temperatures. No more. No less.  As a result, it doesn’t rely on readings ground stations which have tended to be somewhat inaccurate or affected by ambient temperature changes due to man-made construction (i.e. as an area gets ...

Generating about 2.5MWh per month in power.  Far more than I use.  DTE buys the excess energy at 11 cents per KWh.

This past year I had a 20KW solar array put in. For the month of July my electrical bill looked like this: To translate this, my house uses a lot of juice, especially in the Summer months (air conditioning and such).  I’m not proud of the power use. But in essence, the solar array covered 2,685KWh of electrical use. Plus, I had an excess of 640KWh. The DTE program (heavily subsidized by the government) pays me for the energy I produce so I end up with a...

So I have a 20KW solar array. Love it.  But it has one big problem for me that is surprisingly hard/expensive to solve: If the grid power goes off, so does the solar array. That’s because the solar array feeds into the grid with me taking what I need first.  But if the grid isn’t up, the solar array has to shut down because it is no longer connected to the “circuit”.  Besides that, you wouldn’t want to run your house where the power could go on and off randomly based on cloud...