![]() The Wolfords are conservative in their electrical usage and have had to change their habits only slightly to make solar work for them. The other thing to consider are your habits. All this is run from 18 290-watt panels (total of 5220 watts or 5.22 kWh) and a 48-volt battery bank, which holds 880 amp hours for total usable storage of 34 kWh. Now that they’ve retired and the cabin is their “forever home,” as Jerry says, the Wolfords have a new refrigerator, satellite TV and Internet, LED lights, dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, laser printer, laptops and vacuum cleaner. His clients fill out a form regarding the kinds of appliances they use and how many hours per day and per week they use them. “What’s important is your electrical profile – how much electricity you need,” says Daryl DeJoy, owner of and installer at Penobscot Solar Design in Penobscot, Maine. (The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has a map showing the number of solar hours for each state.) And while it might seem that you could just call a solar installer and tell him or her the square footage of your home and its location to get a quote, house size is almost irrelevant. (A peak sun hour is an hour of sunlight that offers 1,000 watts of photovoltaic power per square meter.) New York and Massachusetts, for example, get an average of four hours of peak sunlight per day while Nevada and Arizona get more than six. It depends where in the nation your cabin is located, the season and the peak number of sunlight hours. (AES also does business in Iowa and Massachusetts.) “If you’ve got 40% or less (i.e., 60% shade) on an annual basis, you don’t want to go solar.” The amount of sun exposure is not just about whether you’re surrounded by tall trees or have a south-facing roof. The best is 100% exposure, says Justin Arneson, solar consultant with All Energy Solar in St. The most important criterion to determine whether your cabin is a good candidate for solar is sun exposure. But if you’ve got the right set of circumstances and expectations, using the sun to power your cabin has great benefits. Going solar for your cabin – whether off-grid (not connected to the existing electrical grid), as the Wolfords have done, on-grid or a hybrid version – is a big decision with lots of factors. “Running a generator all the time is not a feasible option – with the cost of propane and keeping up with the maintenance,” not to mention the noise. “We knew we wanted to do solar,” Jerry says. Their 1,900 square-foot cabin in Sullivan, Maine, sits at the tip of Long Pond amid 110 acres of private land purchased by the Wolfords in Frenchman Bay Conservancy. That cost estimate is what pushed Jerry and Victoria Wolford to go solar in early 2017. When you want to connect your cabin to the power grid and the local utility tells you that will cost you $130,000, that’s a strong incentive to look at alternatives. When does solar power make sense for a cabin owner?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |