An Off-Grid Update

Here we are at Darwin’s View! How fabulous and bracing when the electricity in half of the house turns off, usually during a Zoom business meeting or cocktail hour.

A long saga made short, we have two battery systems that are charged by our solar panels, with each battery system charging a separate part of the house. (In 2016-17 we built an addition and a garage. Thus, the house is divided in two: the old and the new.) So when the electricity goes off on one side of the house, we only have to walk to the other side and voila! There is light. 

Except when both systems go down at the same time. 

Our saltwater batteries aren’t as robust as they used to be. Only five years old, this winter has exposed their weakness: an inability to deal with power surges. In the old days—last year—the batteries could support the house down to 50% state of charge. Now, it’s the amperage that matters, not the state of charge. In other words, low voltage, caused by spikes in demand, shuts down the system.

Someday I will have Carl explain it. For now, trust me. It’s complicated. Not least because we have, over the years, jerry-rigged new systems onto the old in order to improve them and get more self-sufficient. But now we are experiencing the consequences of our experimentations, and so when the water heater turns on—or the water pump or the espresso machine—we get an under voltage and the house goes dark with a jarring HONK. And then the lights come back on. But if the water heater/pump/espresso machine calls for power again, which they do because that’s their job, then the house gets into a cycle of on-off-on-off-honk-honk. Again and again.

(Carl would like me to note that one thing I haven’t addressed in this is the number of appliances that we have. I will counter his note by stating that (1) energy budgeting is not the subject of this missive, (2) this is 21st century American off-grid, i.e. we are exhibit A of this century’s conveniences, and (3) please do not judge. I could explain each and every one of our appliances and how they ended up here. In the kitchen: an espresso machine and a super-insulated refrigerator/freezer. Downstairs in the basement: a small refrigerator for vegetable overflow and beer, an upright freezer holding all our produce and frozen soups and stuff, and a chest freezer to hold frozen fruit and enough frozen cider to last us to next October. Our “cold storage” room is an abject failure, given the heating pipes from our recently-installed wood boiler run through it. Then there is the clothes washer, the Tesla, the F-150 truck, and the electric tractor, all optionally charged and only on sunny days. Do you see how off topic energy budgeting can take a person?)

Anyway, back to our power outages. The house has been going into default more and more frequently. Like, every day. And even though I know how to turn on the generator during power surge conditions, there is a time element issue. I don’t push the generator’s buttons fast enough. There are a lot of buttons to push.

Actually, not that many, but they have to be pushed in exactly the right order, and frankly the details might cause your eyes to glaze over if adrenaline weren’t coursing through your body due to the anticipation of the next loud and obnoxious honk. Or, because you pushed the buttons too slowly, the jarring sound of the generator heaving like an old dinosaur trying to stand up after a long sleep.

Thus, it is Carl’s job when the system(s) go down to don his head lamp and go down into the basement to the electric panel and press this and that button until he convinces the generator to turn on—ideally before the next power surge/under amperage/HONK!

All very exciting stuff at 2AM or 5AM. 

I watch, sometimes, holding a flashlight so Carl can see as he dexterously and confidently pushes the AGS (automatic generator starter), the AUX (auxiliary), and the PENGUINS because why not add penguins to this system? They are cute and distracting when one doesn’t want to think about what one has gotten oneself into through one’s attempts to be sustainable in an unsustainable world and culture. Or to wonder why the electricity is not coming through the system because the inverter is trying to qualify the electricity from the dying dinosaur prior to the power going into the batteries. 

Our dear saltwater batteries, so benign and fabulous when we bought them, are suddenly not such a great buy. They work great in England for the chunnel, where they are grid-tied, so they get a more consistent state-of-charge to satisfy the batteries’ inherent needs.

I am not the one anthropomorphizing these batteries. They call attention to themselves. Give them a relatively low and constant demand with occasional sunbursts to charge them and the batteries are happy. But put them in New England, in winter, with weather that is oppressive to the sun and add a water pump, a wood pellet boiler, and myriad appliances? Then the batteries don’t feel quite so self-satisfied. In fact, they go on strike, complaining about the hours, the all-night vigils, the sudden calls at any time of day, and it is just not sustainable. The generator agrees. And so do we because we are using a lot of our fracked propane gas to run our generator when the sun doesn’t, and that makes for two very grumpy 21st century off-grid house occupants.

But what did we expect? To save the world with all our expenditures on solar panels and batteries and electric cars and trucks and tractors? No. But we had hoped to prove that life off grid is doable.

We have not given up. We are getting closer.

We are early adopters and adapters. Sometimes our experiments don’t work. Unfortunately, our 24 saltwater batteries might fall under that category. But we got a solid five years of (relatively) benign use out of them and now we have metal, cotton, plastic, and saltwater to dispose of, not acid or lithium. And it is, at times, inconvenient. But so is the changing weather. The pollution and mass extinctions.

And so I will give you one fact that I have no doubt is in our future: we skid on the edge. At some point, we are going to have to give up some, if not all, of our toys. Go back to, perhaps, the pre-Industrial and the pre-Green revolutions. In anticipation, Carl and I are figuring out a cold storage system that doesn’t require electricity. And maybe someday sacrifices will be made and our espresso machine will be replaced by the manual press ROKO that is collecting dust in the basement.

In the meantime, it’s a cloudy day here at Darwin’s View and we have 3 Fortress Power 48-volt lithium batteries arriving on February 1st to replace the saltwater batteries. Anyone interested in 24 very large and very heavy paperweights?