THE LAST PERSON TO POST HERE WINS - 24

Good day everyone :-)

I'm moving into an area that just got very slightly clipped by Hurricane Matthew, NO flooding but they did lose power for 20 hours because the main line went down several miles away. I trying to decide if a generator is worth it for me or not, at 20 hours I'm not so sure, but of course 20 hours when it's 30 outside, it gets that cold fora few nights of the year there and when the hurricanes come again, which they will, it could be worth it.

In North Carolina, just below Wilmington but above Myrtle Beach, SC on the map, they do get a few hurricanes every year, most just glance the area as Matthew did, but the infrastructure is not new. I am buying a house they are building in a neighborhood that is about 2 miles from the beach, meaning I choose when to interact with the tourists as there is nothing for them in my area. Also they require an automatic switch that cuts the feed when the electrical power is lost coming from outside, so when your generator automatically comes on, mine will be propane as I already have an inground tank, there is zero chance of back feeding the power into the power grid and frying the guy working on it. NO you can not have a manual switch for that just in case you forget to flip it before you power up your generator manually.

My problem is in deciding how big do I go, do I go just enough to power the a/c, heat, stove, some lights and the garage door, or do I go whole hog and power the whole house and the pc's too. The biggest cost of a generator is the generator itself, upping the size is small compared to that initial cost. I have more than a few pc's that will be going with me and would not like to be down for a few days or more.

Doctors are weird!! My wife went a couple of weeks ago because she has some back issues, she had gotten a flu shot a few days before and her Doctor said 'no cortisone shot because you just got a flu shot, come back in 2 weeks'. I went last week because my shoulder was killing me due to several large bone spurs I will need to get removed at some point, he gave me a Cortisone shot and it's much better. As I was leaving the Nurse said 'have you gotten a flu shot yet?' I said 'no but I just got a Cortisone shot so I think I have to wait a couple of weeks', she said 'come with me' and gave me a flu shot on the spot, although I did insist on it being in the other arm!! All that was last week for me and I have no side effects from either shot!! My wife is still counting the days until she can get her own Cortisone shot, hopefully it works as well!!

Correct. What I meant was a gadget ( good ones are about ~ $1K AUD ) that senses external line loss, switches off grid,  and auto-starts the generator. Vice versa upon grid restore. Guarantees the correct sequencing of actions transitioning in either direction. If one is dumb enough to co-power the house simultaneously then the main issue is phase clashing ie. does your generator co-rotate in phase with the utility's ? Probably not and the utility power station's rotor will win that one every time ..... DownUnda we do not know of these dryer outlets that may be misused. 

What our utilities do limit especially is the maximum power that may be returned to the grid by on-property generation. That's ~ 4.5 kW max around here, and you have to obtain an actual permit from your provider. They can say no arbitrarily anyway. They just don't have to buy. But with the rates ( 6 to 10 cents per kWh but steps down with quantity ), the payoff needed for an under ten year return on investment is at least twice that, say 20 cents per kWh. Thus the benefit for home generation is in not buying power at approx 33 cents per kWh peak and 25 cents off-peak. Obviously one can't profit by buying low peak power, storing, with later grid return. But with off-peak buy, storage and on-peak use then you save the amount you would have been paid if you had pumped the grid from your solar. But this is not a flow limited contract ...... the sunshine at least is free ! :-)) 

The short answer is that if one factors in amenity ( what is your personal time worth ? ) then it's pretty close to break-even in under ten years but only if you have roughly $20 - 25 K AUD spare to set up ( including the photovoltaics now ). For an example see here. There is a one-off $4K tax credit on installation though. The other issue may be value adding to the house price. I'd say no at present because we have a real estate bubble here that will pop in about 12 - 18 months ( private information received from outstanding sources ), and soon the market will be awash with properties. Additions like solar installs won't blunt a ~ 30% drop. But in ten years who can say ? 

{ the bubble is stoked by extraordinary taxation levels on everything that moves or breathes outside of one's primary residence and that federally we are going to financially bork it big time before the next election. }

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) If you are totally bored today, then do go on Mike : the other factor is what are called 'smart meters'. In theory these report back to the provider on individual/household power usage for the purpose of network load balancing. In practice they have become a tool for providers to increase their rake as they have micro-knowledge on household habits. These were an enforced purchase ( state legislation ) around five years ago, we pay $1.25 per day* per household for their 'maintenance'. So that's $450 per year now & forever, to service the power provider's marketing department information needs. There was supposed to be a secondary phase on this : provisioning householders with software and a wee bit of hardware to also see what the provider sees about household use. So you can make informed choices right ? Wrong**. That idea has radiated well beyond the solar system by now.

There has been ample opportunity since to dial in good load balancing ie. do we open the gates on the hydro dam tonite, or draw some power from over the border ( our Snowy Mountains scheme serves two states ) ? Etc. Funnily enough the alleged benefit to consumers for allowing cheaper primary sources to be optimally tapped has flowed to wholesale but not retail pricing. A major factor in the next two years will be the closing of Hazelwood coal fired station, probably next April. It was built in 1964 & it's dead Jim. It is a graveyard of asbestos fibres so precisely no site value this century. That's a fifth of the states' generating capacity. Would you be right to assume there is some plan in place for this closure ? Go on, guess ..... 

* .... if instead I left my vacuum cleaner on for four hours each afternoon to offset the cost to the provider for finding out that I did leave the vacuum cleaner on for four hours every afternoon, then might you question my sanity ? 

** .... so they doubled down on the householders that avoided peak costs by doing stuff off-peak, which then lead to the off-peak rate increasing to as much as 75% of on-peak.