PG+E has taken their sweet time attending to our request for a service upgrade. We were ready in November: electrical panel in, electric work inspected by the city. Over five months later, their arrival is announced by a letter in the mail: "We are upgrading the transformer in your neighborhood. You will be powered down all day." And then their parking signs showed up in front of our house yesterday.
Maybe we'll be off the temporary power pole by tonight.
The order is in to PG&E and we're waiting for our electric hookup. We've already decided that we only need 125 AMP service panel(most builders/electricians opt for 200 AMP as standard). Our logic was: shouldn't we be using less and less energy as innovations take hold? Here's the wrench. According to the recent NYTimes article, Cities Prepare for Life with EV, battery-powered motors are more efficient than gasoline engines, costing only 2.5 cents per mile for fuel. Some predict a surge in EV-adoption over the next few years, especially in techie-meccas like the Bay Area. In our case, our Ford Sport Trac, runs at about $1 per mile (and just hit 100k on the odometer). Several loans and a few solar panels later, we could be driving for "free." Our mileage is so low, payback might take awhile. But fast forward to 2020, are we prepared for this onslaught of power usage?
It's not too late. The walls are not yet closed up in the garage. Apparently, an EV car can plug-in to standard 110 volt service, but the battery will take a long time to fully charge, maybe 24 hours. The new Chevy Volt might require a 240 volt quick-charging station that runs off a 50-amp circuit, speeding charging time to something more like a few hours. Claims of a 5-minute, 500-mile recharge sound like they'd require a whole new electric infrastructure of high tension wires running through your neighborhood. Our service is being upgraded from 110 to 220 volts which is done by PG&E as standard practice with a remodel of this nature (110 volt service is fairly dated). Certainly a better option for plugging in your wheels but seems like it still might not pass the cut.
For one, I'm glad that our outdoor outlet will be behind a locked gate. Someone once siphoned gas out of our truck while parked in the driveway. Late-night electric feeding may not be too far off. According to the NYTimes article, outages may also follow this trend if folks don't also early-adopt some solar panels to help feed the local grid. Perhaps that's one reason that PG&E is installing smart meters in our neighborhood.
Should we dedicate a 50-amp circuit to the future? We're not sure what our electric load will be or if our 125-amp service panel will be able to juice an EV. Our panel is rated for 200-amps. Popping in a new main breaker, adding a new circuit and wiring the two feet down to our first outlet should not be a major outlay. We are future-proofed to some degree.
Two years and three months after starting construction, we can finally start closing up the walls. We passed our plumbing, electrical and rough framing inspections last week with a short list of corrections. Kind of like an A-. We checked off most of the corrections this weekend:
We carefully walked through electrical plans (literally walked from room to room with the clipboard and air-switching lights on/off) with our friend and experienced remodeler, Jim Wheeler. We did this over and over again. Jim had the patience to talk through all the potential use scenarios and think through all the pros and cons of decisions. What is the easiest way to install? How can we achieve the desired effect with the simplest configuration? Over time, the number of switches decreased (for simplicity) but the number of outlets increased (for flexibility). We kept track of each decision in our CAD drawing which was our constant go-to specification.
Once we hammered in the boxes, Joel, our electrician consultant, confirmed our circuit diagrams before we ran the wires. Brian found Joel by posting an ad in the craigslist "gig" section. Brian waited for a response that showed some glimmer of understanding and Joel has been awesome. He's a certified electrician, a dedicated do-it-yourselfer, and he understood that we wanted to learn. We walked through the main panel location with him and Jim a million times. We're really happy with our two-panel setup, one in the front with the meter and then a sub-panel on an exterior wall in the five-foot alley. They're easy to access, easy to install, shorter runs, less wire, logical circuit setup.
A few things nipped us, like the fart fans. We wanted low sones, meaning a quiet fan sound. We found a great deal on low sone fans and installed them. Then we read the install instructions. They require 6-inch diameter ducts to the outside. Due to other ...
If you're a consumer looking to simply save money, the CFL will win due to its long life and reduced energy use. If you're a retailer, the cheap incandescent will ensure a steady replacement market, bringing folks back into your store to buy more stuff. If you're the European government, you ban incandescent bulbs, force the choice for everyone, and create a market. If you're Al Gore, you use a lot of CFLs. If you're looking to be lean and green, you are confused as usual. Beeswax candles, anyone?
As we finish up the electrical work and envision the lights turned on, we're hoping our reintroduction to "normal life" doesn't increase our energy use. Our run rate is already above California's average monthly electricity use: 606 kWh/month (our house) versus 508 kWh/month (average per residence). Given that artificial lighting accounts for nearly 25% of a building's electricity consumption, a better light bulb seems like a no-brainer for reducing energy use.
Today's NYTimes article on LED light bulbs reports that LEDs are already five times more efficient than incandescent lamps in terms of not only run-time efficiency, but their entire lifecycle, including manufacturing and reuse potential. According to the cited German study, "LED lamps need less than 2% of their energy consumption for their manufacture – over 98% are used for their task: illuminating the world." It goes on to say, that "simply replacing conventional light sources with LEDs would theoretically halve global electricity consumption for lighting."
So where and when can we get our hands on these things? A quick search on Home Depot leads us to a 3-watt LED bulb that touts itself as a replacement for a 25-watt incandescent (not a major light output). For only $10.99, it could be a cheap experiment, but it has already received one poor review: "This bulb is not bright enough to be used anywhere." At this point, products that compare to 60-watt incandescent light output are slim, nowhere near the widespread offering required to halve global electricity use.
Looking to the future (perhaps in time for our ...
