Gov Surplus Gensets questions

Steve W's post

In my experience PG&E was very cooperative about finding ways to lower costs. We shaved hundreds per month off some commercial accounts by changing to different rate plans. And I remember that a friend who insisted his bill was too high got a house call and a review just by asking for it. Yup, says right here that they still offer free surveys

Gunner - read up on solar water heating systems. Used collectors are often available free for the hauling after pool work. A good scrounger could build an entire system for peanuts. Which would take a big bite out of the gas bill as well.

Wayne

Ah, OK. So it wasn't gunner's rate structure after all.

Nice, but won't help him with his electric bill.

Jim

Okay, I'll revise that - Demand meters as a requirement for all residential customers are not common. For an optional program like the Time Of Use metering you mention, they are available.

But it you head down that road, you get into overnight ice-banking refrigeration and air conditioning and other severe conservation methods. Unfortunately most of those things cost so much to install, and add extra complexity and maintenance costs, that the payback takes forever - unless you're talking large commercial buildings with a full time maintenance staff.

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Bruce? I live in Taft. We didnt even have caller ID until last year. No DSL.

And no fancy s*it from PG&E

If you read the fine print...in many cases PG&E is unwilling or unable to offer all those nifty bells and whistles things to those of us in many small towns.

Ive called them, the PUC, etc etc...and a hell of a lot of the "cool stuff" they offer to folks in the city, are simply not available here in Bumfuckville

They give you all sorts of bumwipe with the bills, telling you not to run your air conditioner (dont have one) during certain hours..the hours where its 110F here in the desert. Do your laundry at 3am. Dont run appliences during peak hours. Hard for the wife to pull the reefer out of the built in and unplug it. Particularly when the cooler is off and its 110F in the house.

After ploughing through all this sort of crap, one simply tosses the s*it in the dumpster. Sort of like killfiling someone who only rarely comes up with something interesting on a newsgroup. Someone you hate for their business practices, their attitude and their arrogance.

I understand that in a large portion of the US, the power company now reads the meter over carrier signals on the power line. Cool.

As a side note...Ive got one of the PG&E power failure communicators in my water heater room. It dials PG&E over my phone line when there is a power failure in my neigborhood. Evidently they dont have any of those fancy bells and whistles either.

Gunner

Leftwingers are like pond scum. They are green, slimy, show up where they are not wanted, and interfere with the fishing.

Strider

Installing a UPS will make NO difference, or will make worse, peak demand charges. You need to spread out the usage of various loads to reduce a peak charge. jk

I missed the staff meeting but the minutes show Gunner wrote back on Sat, 26 Mar 2005 07:26:57 GMT in misc.survivalism :

I'd like to see a photo of this, that was grandmother's preferred car. She lived in a suburb of LA, and when she'd buy a new one, she'd give the old one to her daughter (my aunt.) The story goes that Aunt Dorothy was driving the latest one back, and stopped for gas. The kid at the station took a look and said "Lady, where did you get this car?" (I should mention, Grandmother got them Loaded.) Aunt Dorothy, didn't miss a beat. Immediately said "You're not going to believe it, but I just got it from a little old lady from Pasadena."

tschus pyotr

I missed the staff meeting but the minutes show Gunner wrote back on Sat, 26 Mar 2005 03:40:28 GMT in misc.survivalism :

From my technical expert, what happens is that the Electric company will charge you at a higher rate for the month if your usage goes over a certain level at any time during the month. Which, apparently, includes the five minutes it took to weld the dohicky on the thingamabob. (Or was it a thingamajig?)

Huh? Did you read what I said? You modify the UPS to limit it's charge rate to your average consumption. It will not in any way increase your peaks, it will eliminate them.

It has to be an online type UPS so that the inverter portion is 100% duty cycle rated and the UPS has to be sized to handle your peak load.

What you are doing is storing power in the batteries during times of low usage and then drawing the extra power from the batteries during peak use.

Be current limiting the input section (AC-DC) you eliminate any peaks from showing through to the utility meter, it will see the same peak load (max charging current) regardless of what your true peak load is.

The difference between your actual usage and the charging current represents either a surplus in which case the batteries charge, or a deficit in which case the batteries supply the additional power to the DC bus that the current limited input section won't.

A simpler way to think of this would be a water tank. If you were charged for water base on peak flow rate and not gallons used you would install a large tank and a small feed line to it from your water utility. Say the feed line only flows 5gpm. You can quite readily draw down the tank at a 20gpm rate if you want without it having any effect on the utility side. The water level in the tank will drop, but once your peak use stops and you are drawing less than 5gpm the tank will fill again.

Look at your standard toilet tank for a small scale example. A 1/4" supply line supplies water to a fixture that actually uses water via a

Pete C.

I'm not sure how far the power line carrier reading actually went. I believe in most areas it was scrapped in favor of short range RF. The van just drives down the street and polls all the meters as they come within range.

Pete C.

Have you called and asked about specifics? I think you'll find you're wrong.

Got an example of that fine print? Let's see it. In the meantime, here

What *exactly* have they refused you that's available to city folk? Why would you call the PUC? Who is "etc etc", and why would you call them?

Focus.... look here

If TOU isn't available in your area, then why would they advise you to change your use times? Here's a clue - if you don't have a TOU meter, then they don't have any way to know what time of day your energy is used. Besides, peak hours are from noon to six weekdays, so the 3am laundry thing is transparent malarkey.

That's why you should do a proper analysis first, to help make intelligent decisions about which loads to shift, and which to can. Once you learn the difference between the consumption of a coffee maker and a coffee grinder, then you won't have to make up silly excuses about the need for refrigerator schlepping.

Fourteen years ago in CA I read in some of that crap that I could reduce my electric bill. If I was still there, the savings might have amounted to perhaps $3500 (plus interest) by now. It would be more in your case. So you might consider adopting a "better late than never" attitude.

Wayne

I'm not sure about that, but most of the residential rates are similar anyway. Here

True. So he might as well ignore that advice as well then. :-)

Wayne

A weekends worth of detailed analysis with a notepad, amp probe, watch and a known load will clarify all of the actual usage questions. If I was nearby, I'd offer to help.

The advise everybody to change their use times for their own (Utility) benefit. They want customers to peak shave so they (Utility) do not have to spin up less efficient "peaking" generating units.

Real analysis should confirm where the power is really going, and even if it is at all. Meters do go out of calibration at times.

From what he's indicated it doesn't sound like there is a lot left for him to trim on the electric side. He may or may not be able to make things more efficient on the gas side though.

He already indicated 1 PC 24x7 which should be about 5kwh/day without monitor, refrigerator another couple kwh/day if it's only 5 yrs old. Some CF lighting, perhaps another 2kwh/day. That's somewhere around

A washing machine will add some kwh and a gas dryer still has a motor. No well pump so no electricity there. A gas furnace still has burner and/or blower motors so a bit there during heating season and of course AC in the cooling season.

Other than digging himself a cave or putting a lot of effort into some solar projects I don't see much he can trim. About the only thing is the computer, and there I'd recommend finding a laptop to use as the 24x7 machine which should cut the power use in half or about 75kwh/mo.

Pete C.

I agreed with almost everything in your post, but... he said his bills are from $150 to $300. That tale of skimping would draw some guffaws over at alt.energy.homepower. ;-) Napkin calculation - from perhaps

He's in a good area for solar water heating, and that's easily doable for a scrounger/builder. That would cut his water heating bill >80% if he needs yuppie level hot-water availability, or 100% if he can "survive" occasionally with lukewarm water.

- 300Whrs. (still loads more lighting than we use)

Definitely plenty close enough for general discussion from afar.

Something big, or more likely a lot of somethings small, is missing from his explanation. A home with 2 part-time occupants, gas appliances, no AC, swamp cooler off, and (claimed) thrifty owners shouldn't be able to run up a $300 bill, even in California. Although it sure doesn't take much if that owner isn't quite as aware as he thinks. Figure he's failed to account for a few loads, which could easily put him into the higher brackets. Now, add to that somebody feeling chilled this last rainy and cold Southwest winter, who felt the need for one of those itty bitty cube-sized space heaters nearby for 10 hours a day, and there goes $90 for that one "tiny" indulgence.

Wayne

Yes

Unless 1:your charge period, exceeds 1 or more demand periods, or 2: You DONT charge until a low usage period, you will get no benefit.

TYpically a UPS has the capability to support its load with no charging, for 5-30 min. The charging current & kva have a high peak value when starting a charge, and could easily make your peak charges much worse, especially if you run out of charge during what is still your peak period.

To do that your battery system would have to be SO over sized as to be beyond all belief. Unless of course, you are willing to live with periods of no power, and if that was OK you could just shut things off in the first place.

A better analogy would be a 20 gal tank feeding at 5 gal per min, and then wanting to take a 10 gal per min shower, while some one flushes the toilet.

jk

You are missing the point that you are limiting the input current to your average load, and you are not normally operating exclusively from battery, hence the requirement for an online type UPS.

There is no way you can make your peak charges worse if you have current limited the UPS front end. That is physically impossible.

Remember, I did not say anything about time-of-use rates, I said peak metering which is an entirely different thing.

Again you are thinking of time-of-use rates, not peak metering. What you are doing with the modified UPS is peak shaving, not time shifting.

Your input power may be limited to say 4kw (arbitrary number, you'd do some analysis to find a real number). Your baseline load of refrigerator and lights is using say 2kw of that. You turn on a couple burners on the stove and your load goes to 4.5kw. Your utility feed still supplies 4kw and the batts supply the other .5kw. When you turn off the burners the batteries get to charge again.

The best UPSes for this application are older large online UPSes from large computer rooms. They are often available for next to nothing. Remember that if the UPS was designed to supply 30kw for 10min, it will also happily supply 3kw for 90min. When you factor in that you will still be providing a baseline current to the DC bus from the utility it will work just fine.

Granted this is a lot of work, but if you are forced to deal with peak metering it's the only way to counter it.

Incorrect analogy since the tank is more like 200gal and you are constantly filling at 5gpm (unless full). Your shower uses perhaps

Pete C.

No idea. And Im going to find out. I rather suspect my wife has NOT taken up welding, or heating the house with multiple electric fry pans. I dont think we even have any.

Gunner

Lathe Dementia. Recognized as one of the major sub-strains of the all-consuming virus, Packratitis. Usual symptoms easily recognized and normally is contracted for life. Can be very contagious. michael

Dont own any space heaters. Nor do I need any with a nice fast heating central gas fired heater.

Gunner

Lathe Dementia. Recognized as one of the major sub-strains of the all-consuming virus, Packratitis. Usual symptoms easily recognized and normally is contracted for life. Can be very contagious. michael

Some tips on tracking down waste here

Wayne

Thanks for the link.

Gunner

Lathe Dementia. Recognized as one of the major sub-strains of the all-consuming virus, Packratitis. Usual symptoms easily recognized and normally is contracted for life. Can be very contagious. michael