You are correct JoepK that woodgas and PV solar should be complimentary.
A few -DAMN FEW- like Ray Menke and Bruce Jackson do this.
Here Washington State and USofA Federal money: PV is allowed legal Grids feed-in only if you install as a a grid-tied system. Grid goes down so does your PV system.
“They” “Them” the political powers that-be do not want folks independently producing outside of their control. Those trying get slammed shut down as greedy selfish fish-killers; birds-killers; trees-killers.
So yes the camps of endeavors do divide.
Freed indepenend producers versus those thinking their better baked high-Tech cakes will become full nourishing breads for-all. Fancy cakes have only ever fed a few. And those made unhealthy with rotten teeth.
Great some of you can get paid for your self-made power feed-backs. This is not the normal allowed for the majority. Enjoy that while you can. Do not invest heavily in that possibility. It is now area by area going away.
My one Belgium B-I-L said he was lucky getting in under the wire. Since then he says Belgium has stopped paying for new home PV feed-in systems. Too much now limited hours feed-ins over-loading distribution systems.
Steve unruh
This is my opinion but I also live and do this everyday.
Dont over build the system make only the power you need. The bigger the inverter the more power it consumes. Build so you can stack them as well. Dont need full power? Turn one off. Get Solar! There is no excuse not too. Panels are cheap. You do not want to run a generartor everyday, you will wear the thing out. The less you need to run the wood gas generator system the more viable it becomes. It will become a burden on you after the magic wears off. Get sick but dont have fuel processed? Yeah been there. A gasifier is best as a back up solution to solar I would never want to have to rely on a gasifier for daily power supply.
Exactly Matt, been there done that. With pellets. Got my hamstring snagged off surgury etc etc, bleeding for 8 weeks and happy I still have my leg. In the mean time no one didnt know how to fill or clean the pelletburner??? Dont ask about wood for the Atmos…Work is so busy that I dont want to bother lighting it, let the backup pelletboiler do his job. With that in mind I am very carefull about the Lister, to much of a slave of my own system and dont want to make it worse.
I heard that a few times. How is that possible? If you want to be off grid you just go off grid! Who is going to stop you? Matt is doing the same, not easy, but he is. Other state other laws?
Yes Matt, one thing we Americans have almost all have forgotten, and that is how to survive with out electricity. We seem to need these things like freezers, I have 2, refrigerators I have 2. Electrical lights, and all the electrical appliances, washer, dryer, A/C , and the list goes on and on. Just in 150 years everything has changed. Can the human race survive and make it with out all of these things?
Time will tell in the next up coming 1000 years. I will love to see it all happen. By God’s Grace.
For now we do what can do with what we have avaliable and call it good. Right?
I do not depend on the governments that are apart of this world system. These are my thoughts I go by.
I think its going to happen much sooner than that lol
If you want to be successful going off grid. Learn to do more with less. You dont have to sacrifice anything if you learn to do things more efficiently. That is much easier to do today then it was yesturday.
Hi JoepK.
I was referring to any who would make up micro-hydro; home wind electricity; or as J.O. has and the new Finn guy have overspeed three phase electric motor drive by woodgas power feed back into the grid.
ONLY PV solar is allowed feed-in.
And that PV solar ONLY if the controller is Grid phase locked.
Of course their are ways to flip-switches separate out Island the home system’s PV, ever the Grid goes down.
David Baille has written quite a bit about that.
But truely here in Washington State you’d have to hide that capability. Matters little as they pay so little here for your feed-in “contribution”.
I think the most practical is to stay grid connected for the household. Conventional. But a bit exterme on the usage consumptions.
Then go completely off grid for the shop and out-buildings power. “They” cannot say anything about that if there is no visible possible interconnecting.
Down south our homeowners insurance company made me sign off an exclusionary waiver on the outbuildings.
Then you will develop the capabilities both ways. Using them daily/weekly.
My line of efforts has one inviolatable rule: IF I must use their $'s subsidies; toady down too much on my knees kissing ass too much for their rules I just will not do it for DIY power.
I and the Wife have involuntary taxed paid out hugely to Washington State for wind farms in stupid places and acres and acres of PV solar arrays for Green Public Power here on the wet cloudy wet-side.
WE pay out plenty now in additional carbons taxes for each and every gallon of gasoline, diesel and propane bought. Yet the electric car folk get huge subsides from this confiscated taxes moneys. Not called VAT here. Not even VAT improvements here from these taxations.
Simple: Those who can and will must always pay for those who cannot or won’t. With the Deciders in the middle always getting theirs. Shrinking the wealth transfering.
Ever come the kick-back reactions after a societal wind-down Collapse you do not to want to be driving around in an electric vehicle. Living in a full roof covered PV solar been State and Federal subsidized house. Angers will destroy. Visible Values to strong-arm steal.
Wood smoke. Blend in then. Poor boy common folk present. Practice that now.
S.U.
All right, sounds like a reasonable safety rule. If you want to feed in your generator that way, probably no problems to expect as long as you stay low profile.
Yes, taxes, deciders, politics, dont fight them, take your chances. As long as there is more coming back from my taxes I am ok with it. And I mean the indirect things like a reliable grid, clean roads, good health care etc, there is nothing to complain about and I am very willing to pay my duty. In the center of power there is always filling of pockets, it wont be different in our country, as long as they keep a focus on the main goal in society and dont build their own castles from my money.
It wont be bether in a gas car if I understand correctly. Subsidized is gone here, the only remains are the possibility of using the grid as a battery. Is it called net-metering? So, a very good arrangement but it must go. Cost me a lot of money if it does but it is no good, subsidy. We have seen it with the farmers, the only thing they rely on is subsidy. Not a healthy businesscase.
Sorry sitestep, PV is easy and I am lurking towards wind. But the last years there is so much windpower installed that dynamic prices drop to almost zero or negative. Good thing about wind is that the mill provides when it is dark Downsite is more moving parts and maintanance.
Aha, now I see what you mean. If you want to keep the lights on in your house , you need a hybrid inverter. PV and a battery and this inverter shuts of the line to the grid so people can safely repare the grid.
I think that was normal domestic at the time. Only reason I can think of is that apartments don’t have 3-phase. At the time most apartment buildings had common laundry rooms and there was very little demand for 1-phase machines. Nowdays you have no choice, unless you pay 10 times the price and go industrial.
Energy supplier changing overs used to be done slowly as the New proved better and individual Industries; Businesses; street-blocks; households and farms saw the benefit to invest in them. The wise retaining enough of the previous, for just-in-case. Most all ocean ships for 30-40 years kept some sail capacity for at least steerage in the slow transition to steam.
Yes.Yes. Certainly later the new-suppliers once widely used and entrenched have lobbied hard for exclusive rights and financial benefit subsidies. Big Coal. Big Oil. Big Nuclear. Now Big Wind.
Here in the States of Washington and Virginia organic grown meats and produce started out as small farms cultivating for customers.
Once the few who succeeded grew big, they bought out most of the rest of 1st generation beginners then. The Big One’s lobbied then for exclusive rights to the Organic name. Pushed through “needed” licensing steps, inspections and bookkeeping requirement for dirt to product proof of certified organic all-inputs chains.
So now no one above board, openly, can afford to start up a fresh new “Organic”.
The too overly simplistic “Big fish eats, Little fish”.
Cute but not completely true. This is said as a distactor. Because . . .
Sometimes a little fish bites the big fish and he dies slowly. Infected.
Sometimes many, little fish flash-mob and will strip to the bones a Big fish.
No. No. Not me a ever a little threatening fish. I once did became a hunter-suppressor of dangerous little fish.
I wearied. Little dangerous fish keep sprouting up. I wanted a more peaceful Life.
Living now at the end of a dead-end road with few neighbors. None demanding. None Angry. None wanting to shake up the world.
it is my belief that the forced changers far-left; far-right will run the wheels off of this current normal. Stand aside as much as you can. But still do Live daily. Finding peace and happiness daily.
S.U.
Organic is controlled by the feds and they do have licensing and testing requirements if you wish to sell ‘organic’ as a commodity farmer as a base ingredient to a commercial say bakery. However, there is a loophole for small scale farms that sell less then like $10k in products without the licensing provided they are selling an end product to the end user.
The last time I looked, it was around 5k to certify a farm, and you need 3 years without any non-organic approved and labeled inputs for fertilizer, pesticides and seeds. Then they come out and do soil tests. You have to get recertified and have complete documentation for all inputs but I think that is only like 1k every 3 years.
Honestly the food business is really hard. For non-organic commercial fresh veggie growers, you have to have like 5 years of production records before you can get a contract with a major distributor to grow a specific crop. So when they contract with you, they have a good idea of what the yield and quality will be and if you don’t achieve the minimum, you won’t get another contract. It is a tough business.
and I should add, the main issue I see with ‘organic’ is that the Feds don’t have the any real legal right for organics produced in other countries. there is far less oversight. So rules and laws you have to follow in the US, aren’t necessarily followed in Canada or Brazil because they can’t enforce them.
. You can fill a lot of pages with that, pretty or not.
Organic is cool. Customer demands. Beautiful to see that farmers switch over and businesses start. We need honest healthy food, not the good looking filled with poison. We dont use round up and almost only buy organic. Big change the last twenty years. It started with the kids. From that moment the chief was sharp on food.
Some supermarkets buy direct from farmers overhere. The bigger the market, the tighter the contract. AH, the biggest, lowered prices and did that three months back. Imagine that, you sell you crops for a price and three months later you to give your money back. Farmers are really sitting in a corner where they get hit. Really time for a change. On paper they are millionaire in real life the poorest people. Unhealthy situation.
Most of the homesteaders that I’m associated with that sell produce at farmers markets grow organic but do not sell as such. The just advertise as being grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Their customers understand what they are saying. If you are selling hydroponically grown then you cannot even make that claim. It’s a matter of balance and chemistry and what plants actually need to uptake for healthy growth. The problem with most ammonia/urea based nitrogen amending fertilizers is that they are heavy into salts which with repeated applications do poison the soil. They are primarily derived from petro-residue
Is fertilizer made from oil and gas?
One of the by-products of oil refining is petroleum coke, also known as ‘coke’ or 'petcoke. ’ With over 80 percent carbon, petroleum coke is essential to manufacturing fertilizer, where it undergoes a gasification process to create ammonia and urea ammonium nitrate. This is then used to create nitrogen fertilizers.
There is really no effort made to measure the amounts of heavy metals introduced in to the soil as micro-nutrients. Invariably Turns out to be too much of a good thing. This blocks off the plants ability to absorb some other necessary nutrients and you end up with food that is " low energy". This is not true of hydroponic chemical solutions which are carefully metered.
Yup, there are many ways to flow with the system’s rules as far as electricity goes. The new gear is getting better and better the lithium batteries are getting cheaper and more reliable and the price of panels is now dirt cheap. A net metered system with a hybrid inverter feed, a battery bank for shaving off those peak times of the day, charging up a battery in the low cost dead of night, feeding in biomass generator power during cloudy periods and letting the solar hybrid inverter run the interface with the utility, the list goes on and on. There is no more “selling” to the grid here but you can bank kWHr credits with the utility to use at a later time. It’s a great way to balance things out for the seasons. My problem these days is I believe that the era of back feeding the big utilities should be drawing to a close as it seriously benefits those with the money to do it while penalizing those who cannot afford to invest in it. I’m not much of a class warrior but it is a real issue out there and it’s getting worse. Same goes for electrification. Right now in Ontario you can get grants and zero interest loans for renovations, heat pumps, solar, you name it; if you can jump through the hoops. The problem is that those “hoops” are things like a stable higher income and great credit which excludes those who could benefit most from them. Electric cars are the same racket to an even higher degree. It makes me highly concerned for what comes next.
Cheers, David
Yes, in Belgium you can save on your connection that way. We in Holland still have the credit system and on top we can sell the surplus for as long as it is. Can change tomorrow, you never know.
Most hybrids dont peak shave on different phase, all or nothing. Gonna change a lot on that.
You certainly can do organic hydroponics and even be certified as organic. Nutrient solutions are derived from plant and animal material or naturally mined substances.
it is like seaweed, cooked fish parts, limestone, etc. The brown seaweed solution, and the cooked fish stuff for aerobic bacteria,. mycorrhizal fungi, solution from Elaine Ingham where I posted the recipe that all that stuff is used in organic gardening and organic hydroponics. BUT the stuff is expensive. Her solution was like liquified seaweed, which was 25 bucks for not even a gallon and 50 bucks for the processed fish stuff for a gallon, etc.
My electric company allowed me to grid tie up to 1000 watts without any permits or inspections. The problem was that on a good day I was only back feeding a bit over a kilowatt hour of power back in from such a small amount of solar panels meaning it was saving sometimes 25¢ worth of money a day. Right now I only have 2 solar panels (rated at 200 watts) hooked up to an old battery as a backup for some lights in case of a power failure.
I unhooked my other panels for the winter but was using them in a workshop without access to the grid mostly to charge cordless power tool batteries. I was using another old car battery to store the solar power but often there was more solar power available than that battery could store meaning much of the available energy was wasted. A battery bank big enough to supply usable electricity at night is not in my budget which is why I tried using the grid as my battery but the savings on the electric bill wasn’t even noticeable.
At around 20 kwh per day (rounded up) according to the electric bill, a bigger generator than I have could possibly provide all the power used if it provided 5000 watts for 4 hours a day. At around $1 a watt for solar panels and some more rough calculations, solar would take less than 10 years to pay for itself assuming the cost and usage stays about the same.
A generator run on wood or charcoal could work but maintenance and wear and tear on the generator would need to be figured in.
Personally, I use both solar and a charcoal Powered generator both now not connected to the grid. Solar for battery charging and generator mostly to run power tools that are not close enough to the house to plug in.
Downsite is more moving parts and maintanance.
.