Getting off the Grid!

Rosemary is one of my heroes because her house is "off the grid."  Being off the grid means being off of the electrical power grid.  Her house uses solar power for energy.  One day I hope to follow in her footsteps.  Go Rosemary!

              Here's a picture of the solar panel at Rosemary's house.

"LeeRay said that she thought it would be interesting if you talked about how you got off the grid, and why you decided to do that, and blah, blah."

"Oh, OK, well, so when I decided to move, build a house down here, I’m a half mile down the road, by the time you get here.  I didn’t want any underground power lines, any more, there’s already one, that goes to Ron’s house."

"Is he on the grid?"

"Yeah, he’s on the grid, the farm is on the grid, it’s just my house that’s not."

"Um-hum, and the, uh, apprentices houses, they’re not."

"Right, the  apprentices have solar panels for their lights and stuff...Anyway, in order to bring electricity down here, you really needed to have an overhead line, which we didn’t really want, neither of us wanted to see, or underground, which was really expensive.  And that’s one reason I looked into solar, and found out that solar installation is the same cost as running the line underground.  The other reason that I liked the idea was because DC current, there’s no electro-magnetic fields associated with DC current."

"What’s DC current?"

"DC is what, direct current or alternating current, there’s 2 kinds of current, and when you have a solar panel,  it makes DC current.  What comes through the transmission lines is AC current.  So if you want to plug any normal electrical appliance into your solar house, you have to have an inverter, which converts DC current to AC current."

"Wow, I don’t really understand, but OK."

"Yeah, I don’t really know what the difference is, except that this is 12 volts at DC, direct current, whereas a house has 120 volts at alternating current.  These days, most people with solar homes have an inverter, and so everything is just run to an AC current, just like what comes into the house."

"Um-hum, but you don’t have that."

"But I decided not to do that because the electro-magnetic fields that go through a house and make kind of a buzz and so forth, they’re not, they don’t happen with DC current.  They only happen with AC current."

"Hum, I didn’t even notice that."

"Yeah, see it’s quieter.  I like the quietness of the DC.  So, DC enabled me to not do AC current.  And, I don’t know, it’s an interesting decision, I don’t know if it’s really the best.  But, um…"

"You could change it if you really wanted to."

"Right, I could put in an inventor and start using other appliances if I want.  I have to buy DC light bulbs."

"Oh, so your light bulbs are different."

"Right."

(I look at them.  They are spiraled.)  "Oh, they are different!"

"Well that’s a compact florescent, what  you can actually get AC 110 compact fluorescents.  That’s a-well that’s a different story, but, that’s an 18 watt bulb, and it puts out, what about a 70 watt bulb would normally put out.  So…we really conserve a lot of…electricity by using compact fluorescents."

"Do you conserve a lot of electricity using AC current?  Do you think?  Did that make sense?"  (laughs)

"You can, yeah, you can always conserve electricity. You can get compact fluorescents in AC.  But I don’t have a washing machine. I could, I’d have to do, I could get an inverter that would only do one outlet and turn it on whenever I use the washing machine, or whatever was in there."

"Just to convert in that outlet."

"Yeah, I could do that."

"But how do you wash your clothes?"

"There’s a washing machine in the house, in Ron’s house that I own half of, we bought it together.  So I just go up there. Then I hang it up down here.  So…what else?…There’s a freezer in his house that I own half of, electric freezer.  So I use part of that."

"So you don’t have any big appliances here."

"In electric, no. I just have a ceiling fan and a…blender, and lights and a stereo.  I have a car stereo."

(laughs)  "A car stereo?"

"Yeah, cars are 12 volt DC."

"Oh, neat. That’s neat."

(We laugh)

"Hum, so you decided to do it mostly because you didn’t want to see power lines, and, and it’s better for the environment, too."

" I think it is, although, I don’t know.  There’s a lot in the volumes, I mean, there’s some toxic stuff involved.  So if it’s a question of what’s the most efficient, I don’t know.  And I think in general I’m in favor of small-scale stuff.  So generally I would rather see people in some ways able to produce their own power, you know, more locally, than have it these giant lines coming from Florida to east coast power plants.  But I can’t run and solve all the problems.  (laughs)  So I’m not claiming that it’s much environmentally better because of all the stuff that goes into the hardware.  But it is collecting energy from the sun which is essentially the right thing to do as opposed to burning something to get the energy."

"What about wind power?  I don’t think there’s enough wind here."

"I don’t know, maybe up on that hill, I’ve always wanted a windmill up on the hill there, above the barn."

"Is that cleaner?"

"Yeah, it is, I think so…Well, I don’t know because if you’re gonna' produce power you need to store it in a battery, so that means you’re gonna’ use batteries with that, too.  I think the battery is the most toxic part."

"So these are obviously rechargeable batteries."

"Right, they get constantly recharged by the sun."

"But then, like how do you know when they’re bad?  What do you do with them when they go bad?  Do they go bad?"

"I think that yeah, they do.  I mean I think the technology is there to rebuild, to build a battery that will never go bad, but they don’t use it.  (laughs) ‘Cause they don’t go bad.  So, I don’t, we recycle them, we take them to someone here who can recycle them."

"Is it like auto parts, like they reuse them, like rebuilt batteries, like…?"

"I don’t know if they actually rebuild the case, but they take the lead and all that stuff out and they can reuse it in building new batteries.  And I think they last 10 or 15 years, I’m getting ready to ask my electrician that ‘cause  I don’t know."

"Who is your electrician?"

(We talk at once and drown one another out)

"Where does that person live?"

"He lives in Christiansburg."

"Oh, that’s neat."