Perfect Thunder in the Valley Weekend – Energy profile

Thunder in the Valley:

Stock up on the the ice and beverages and get ready for an awesome weekend! Thunder in the Valley is this weekend and it’s going to be hot and beautiful!

It starts on Saturday and runs through Sunday. There is a show and shine at the Harbour Quay too. All the details are at the website linked above.

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Fire Hazard
Heard on The Peak this morning that 3 fires were started in the Coastal region in the past couple days, and they’ve all been human-caused. Now that summer weather has finally arrived please be extremely careful with any fire activity, sparks from ATVs/motorbikes, etc. The forest is drying out fast. They say we will hit “High” fire rating in the next few days and Extreme never seems to be far after that. There is no significant rainfall in the forecast for the next couple weeks. Please be careful out there. Camp fires are still permitted. I will post a note if I hear of anything changing. BC Wildfire.ca has all the info.

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Typical Energy Profile
I was pretty excited to get a new fridge yesterday. Our old one liked to leave puddles of water for us on the floor in the morning and I don’t think it EVER shut off. Not only is our food going to stay more fresh, we should also save a bundle on energy costs.

I’ve posted my energy consumption link before. You can click on the “Solar Power Potential” link in the current conditions to get to my energy page for my house.

Here’s my usage from yesterday afternoon since the fridge was installed:

To effectively, and permanently, reduce ones energy consumption you have to eliminate or reduce the peaks, and lower the base load.

Insulating the hot water heater should reduce the amount of times those peak appears in a day.

My base load is probably a little higher because of the equipment (webcam, computer, network gear) used to keep this website running 24/7/365.

To reduce the base load you can do things like make sure printers, faxes, and other electronics are turned off when you’re not using them. There is also the problem of “phantom power”. TVs, audio receivers, and digital cable/satellite receivers all still draw power even when you’ve turned them “off” with the remote. Digital Cable and Satellites are especially bad. You can eliminate that power by turning them off from a power bar, but note that cable and satellite boxes will need a minute or two to reestablish their connections to the TV providers. We do this with our upstairs TV, but don’t with our main TV as it also removes the ability to do PVR. OH Noooees! 🙂

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2 thoughts on “Perfect Thunder in the Valley Weekend – Energy profile

  1. The webcam and mac mini and backup hard drive would consume the most. They likely draw about 150W total. The weather station and network equipment might add another 40W. So I’d probably need 200W of solar panels (peak) to start offsetting the weather stuff. That would take a total of 3 panels to get to 210W… And that would offset it for a couple hours a day.

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