Things

This is a shot of the community garden outside the flats. Apparently it has been going for 8 years. The ladies and Gents who set this up will be sad to leave all their hard work behind.

Community garden, created long before it was trendy.

Shot of the sunset taken from the flat, I can see the pub from here!

Rosemary Branch and the Sunset

The Eagle Has Landed... finally. Well it was about two weeks ago.

The idea of this experiment was not just to punish myself it was actually to see if I could live fairly comfortably with a pretty small solar array (one 130W panel) and a revolutionary DC micro grid (see previous posts). After a few teething problems involving me destroying the battery back up before plugging in the solar input we are finally up and running and the system is functioning gloriously. I can't tell you how good it feels to finally be able to come home and turn the lights on and charge my phone and laptop. I can read without cranking up the wind up lantern every 15 minutes, I can watch Iplayer and movies again, I can write my blog and I can have friends round again (although I didn't convince them that cold showers were actually better than warm ones). I have never managed to run out of electricity and can comfortably run lighting, phone charging, internet and music on my laptop all evening without any problems. Ok so it is the middle of summer and we are getting much more solar resource than can be expected in the winter. On the other hand I intentionally only used a pretty puny 130W solar panel. If I was doing this in the winter (which I am hoping to do) I would use a slightly bigger and more efficient 250W panel, or if I can, a monster 333W panel.

Scott and Alex after spending their first night off grid together. They seemed to be very much in love. Alex took his sleeping bag home with him as I don't have a usable washing machine.

Here is the kit working...

Lithium Ion battery with 480wh capacity, two 4 W LED lights which  would last forever and the clever bit; The Home Energy Hub borrowed off Moixa. It acts as a charge controller. So far neither my laptop or mobile phone have blown up. How.... fortunate [Mr Bond].

You can now watch this Youtube Clip, it is what I sing in the shower (the clip isn't actually me in the shower, don't worry).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76RrdwElnTU

We bolted the one solar panel vertically to the west facing 'balcony' rail (I use inverted comas as you can hardly call it a balcony). The rail is solid iron. We used M8 bolts, Hilti carrier section and Hilti End clamps. All suitably over engineered fixings so I can sleep at night.

Here is Glen, the Joju roofer lining up the mounting rail.  Perfectionist.

And most importantly, can you see the panel which is providing all my electricity needs this summer?

Yep, it is there somewhere.

As we all know a west facing solar panel won't generate as much as one facing south and vertically mounted panels won't do as well as one at a 30 degree pitch. My panel will generate roughly half what a perfectly orientated panel will generate. There is a fantastic website which will work all this out for you, take into account local climate data and give you a breakdown for each month and a daily average. Really useful:

http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/

My panel should generate around 250wh of electricity per day in July. Plenty:

Solar resource broken down month by month. Loads of energy in the summer, but could I go off grid in the winter? Average of 30 wh per day with a 130W solar panel in December.

Lights

Having lights in your house is a necessity. I have lived for a couple of weeks just using a wind up lantern and bike light. Its depressing and a massive pain (expletives removed). After rugby and a couple of jars at the Faltering Fallback I got home to find that I'd accidentally left the battery for the DC micro grid off which meant that there was no charge in the battery from the solar panel. It was a gloriously sunny day, we won't see one like that for at least a week.

I aim for this to be the last dinner I 'cook' in the dark. I had to cook holding my bike light in my mouth

It really doesn't have to be like this, over the last few years LED lighting has come on in leaps and bounds. The cost of an LED light used to be prohibitively expensive and only give a cold, white and unpleasant type of light. More recently you can get a decent bulb to replace your bayonet, screw or halogen spotlight from about £10 - £30. Still quite expensive but with a much longer life and only using about 5% of the energy that an incandescent bulb uses and also much less energy compared to CFLs (the last generation of energy efficient lighting). And unlike CFLs, LEDs light up to full brightness instantaneously. You can find bulbs which feel like the old incandescent bulbs, giving off a warm, yellowish glow, if that's what you like.

Here is the view outside my flat, the park to the left is being lit by LEDs, they've used a cold white kind of light which I think feels like really bright moonlight or star light. Ideal for a park. Contrast that to the sickly yellow light from the streetlights to the right of the image. The incandescent light gets everywhere causing light pollution. The switch over to LED lighting will not only save about 95% of the energy used compared to old incandescent lighting but also mean that we will be able to see the stars in the cities again.

With the switch over to LED lights we'll be able to focus the light more effectively, reducing glare and light pollution.  Maybe we'll be able to see the stars in the cities again.

I just spoke with David, a journalist who's friends with my colleague Joe at work. As he answered the call he said he was just adding some milk to his tea which he just got from his cupboard of Satan (that's the fridge btw).

He also asked why I was going off grid - I didn't have a great answer for him so I thought I'd build on that and write a bit more about why what I'm doing is a bad idea.

1) I like renewable energy. Renewable energy works really well when it is linked to other forms of renewables over a big network. The bigger the network, the better it works. Doubters of renewable energy love to point out that the sun doesn't always shine or the wind doesn't always blow, but they are wrong, It does... (somewhere). If the network is big enough there will always be some form of renewable energy available in large quantities. You can rely on the sun, even on cloudy days delivering huge amounts of solar energy. And the day time is exactly when we need most of our energy. Solar fits very well with wind power, the wind resource increases in the winter when the solar resource is poor.

2) I haven't set up my solar panel yet, so I have no power other than a wind up lantern and a camping stove! I spent most of Sunday siting in a cafe (with a milky tea) trying to charge my laptop. Is that cheating? Yes probably. It made me think of a scenario where the fuel poor had to walk for miles in order to charge up batteries. I'm sure its happening already. After my single solar panel is set up I'm hoping I'll 'feel the benefit' a bit more.

3) Cooking using a camping stove when you are not camping is ridiculous, heating water for washing is even worse. It is not an efficient way of cooking. Cooking on gas from the mains is the best we have at the moment. Processing gas into transportable cylinders takes energy and is more energy intensive than getting it from the grid. Eventually we will need to move away from gas cooking to use electricity but until electricity generation is dominated by renewable sources, stick with your gas cooker if you have one. Heating water with gas from the mains isn't too bad either, especially if you have an efficient boiler. Certainly don't use a camping stove. The best option is to get solar thermal. Get the sun to heat your water while you are chillaxing.... yep I said it.... chillaxing.

Tea with no milk, looks horrible - how does anyone drink that stuff?

Email from Duncan

I found the image of our tower block and contacted the photographer (a chap called Duncan) to see if I could use it on the blogg, here is what he said:

Hi Jon

No problem thanks for asking and it looks good on your blog. Good luck going off grid. I don't think it is as rare as you think. I worked for Hackney Council and now work for Southwark. I think a fair number of people especially those with the rip off key meters often have to go without gas and elec for days at a time. 

I have more photos of Harwood Court about somewhere. I was an asbestos surveyor at Hackney and enjoyed doing Harwood Court. The lift motor room and water tank room on the roof is clad in lovely asbestos cement shingles. I'll find a snap and upload it. Just remembered doing the block across the road before it was demolished, cant remember the name but some of the flats had not changed inside since the 1960s.

Cheers

Duncan

Day three

Eating dinner in the dark last night... wasn't ideal.

Just getting into the fun part of this experiment. I've been away for the bank holiday weekend so last night was the 3rd night off-grid in my flat. The first few nights I had the benefit of 500 Wh of battery energy from Moixa. Now I've used most of that energy up (I've still got a few bars of energy on my laptop) I'm relying on my wind up lantern. After rushing home from kickboxing I managed to use a bit of natural light to make dinner. By the time it was ready it was pretty dark and I wasn't really sure what I had made. 

What is that? Tasted good though.

For Some reason all this reminds me of 28 weeks later... awesome film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGwgSyFxVTs

After eating dinner I thought I'd brave another cold shower, partly because the pan I use for heating water is the same as the one I use for cooking and partly because I wanted to see if I was tough enough (I concluded that I'm totally nails). 

Tip #1 If you have no heating or lighting, find the clothes you want to change into before you have a shower, makes it allot easier, trust me. 

After all this I fealt pretty good about my self and settled down to read a book, "Antarctica", by Kim Stanley Robinson. 

Here we go! Now off grid!

5, 4, 3, 2.... 1 off!

This was me last night turning off the electricity. I think it will take me a few days to not instinctively reach for the light switch when I walk into a room. Fortunately, being the middle of the summer, its not dark for long and even when its dark there is so much light pollution you can find your way around quit easily. But it doesn't have to be like this for long.  

Yesterday I went to see Moixa Energy with Nick, our Senior electrician at Joju Solar. Moixa came up with the USB powered battery: http://www.moixaenergy.com/page.asp?pageid=3 helping us to stop using ridiculous disposable batteries (more on this later). 

Moixa also specialise in DC micro-grids. What the hec is that? Here's a photo of Simon from Moixa  with his Micro-grid kit:

Simon from Moixa with his fancy DC micro grid kit.

First a bit of back ground. The national grid uses AC (alternating current) but nearly all our gadgets work using DC (direct current). When you buy a mobile phone or a laptop they all come with a transformer to convert the AC to DC, there are big efficiency losses on the way, you can tell because your transformer/charger gets really hot.

Here's my laptop transformer. Its hot... ouch!

To be honest I'd quite like to have lighting and be able to charge my laptop and mobile phone. Fortunately, with the right kit this takes virtually no energy. Laptops and mobile phones are designed to be energy efficient for obvious reasons i.e the manufacturers want them to last for as long as possible before you need to re-charge them. LED lighting also uses virtually no energy. We are talking about 4 Watts to get the same light that an old 100W incandescent bulb would achieve. That is phenomenal progress. When politicians talk about generating enough energy to keep the lights on, its now only a fraction of what it used to be and most (if not all) of that can be generated locally using renewable energy. 

Moixa kindly let me borrow some of their kit. I'll let you know more about this and how we hooked it up in my next post.