UKC

What steps and consumer stuff would I need to buy to become less dependant on gas and electricity suppliers?

How much would all this cost and how long would it take to recover my initial costs?

Could I make a difference or would it just be an expensive folly?

In reply to The Lemming:

It depends on how whole heartedly you want to go into it I think. If you were willing to strip out all your 240v wiring and stick in 12v, then running electrics independently would be a doddle. We've got 12v on the boat we live on, all powered by solar panels. Check our boat tour video for a summary of the setup if you're interested:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT9U1fPkHj0mJjC4LWGH26g

You'd have to make some sacrifices, like no hairdryers of tumble dryer etc in the house. Also, unless you can sail your house to somewhere sunny, I think you'd also need a wind turbine of some sort. Easily doable though, there's plenty on the market.

Cooking and heating is much more difficult, and being independent of fossil fuels / energy companies is almost impossible for this... A wood burning stove and a patch of woods is probably your best bet, but it'd be a lot of work compared to the button switch system you're probably used to?

I think a lot of it depends on the level of comfort / modern living you want to achieve, and how much you're willing to give up.

In reply to RyanOsborne:



I want my cake and eat it in the comfort of my own home. I don't want to go to the extreme of a houseboat as I much prefer my stone frigate with its central heating and washing machine. With all this in mind, what realistically can I expect to achieve with wind and solar options?

Would such options just be window dressing giving the illusion that I am being green when in effect I am throwing money away on a white elephant along with still paying full whack to the energy suppliers?

In reply to The Lemming:

Gather energy, use it when available and store the rest efficiently. You need energy collectors: passive solar heating designed into the house, solar panels hot water and PV, wind/water turbines, coppice wood etc as appropriate). You need storage: insulated draughtproof house, thermal store, battery bank. You need some way to convert your stored energy into something useful: wood burner with boiler, immersion heater to dump excess PV, a safe inverter to allow you to use your stored electricity.


Quite a bit and you're unlikely to. That said, this is a how long is a piece of string type question, if your useage is low, you're flexible/handy/resourceful and you have a lot of space and understanding neighbors it all gets easier.


Yes and it depends how you went about it.

Where you start does depend to some extent on where you are already. Some of the bits listed will yield big returns relative to the cost, some nothing unless other jobs are tackled first, some might be worth doing in a few years but not at today's prices.

If you just want to clean up your carbon footprint a bit then buy renewable electricity and carbon offset gas (I get mine from Good Energy but there are several others). Next to no added cost vs standard variable rate 'Big 6'.
jk

In reply to The Lemming:

Too expensive on electricity at the moment due to storage costs.

I have 4 kW of solar + ASHP + solar thermal. I've got roof capacity for 20 kW but as battery storage is too expensive. I can go mostly off-grid with 2 Tesla powerwalls at £11k + installation investment. But I get no subsidy for that unlike the ASHP and both types of Solar. If I can save 2/3 electricity needs then I'll only save £600 /yr.

You could do it if you don't care about being green - and switch to oil / gas. Or there is biomass, with dubious green credentials.


All in all I think you'll struggle to break even financially on any investment, but if you also see a benefit in being greener (which was my aim in choosing ASHP over oil) then you go for it.

If you £X to spend though, you may be better at reducing the heat loss from you house than buying a different system.

In reply to The Lemming:
We are off grid for everything except electricity and broadband.
Water treatment system and bore hole shared with 2 neighbors, then oil tank/ boiler (all less than 5 years old) for each house. Hoping in the future when the boilers are all getting to the end of their lives we might be able to set up a shared heat system that doesn't rely on fossil fuels (maybe ground source).
But I think getting off grid from mains electricity is still way off in the future. Until it can reliably power a washing machine, tumble dryer and a power shower, it's a non starter for me.

In reply to SAF:
Since when has a tumble dryer been essential? It isn't hard to do without. After a medium spin all my clothes dry on a folding rack on my landing. I heat my house minimally even in winter and everything dries within 24 hrs, a fair bit quicker in summer.

In reply to SAF:


Perfectly doable now; a 5 kw Victron inverter charger with some lead acids could do that without breaking a sweat. This would add about £3.5k to a solar PV system assuming cheap batteries with a 10 year life.

It would give a modest rooftop solar-PV array, enough storage to do all your needs for about 10 months of the year. The last 2-3 months are a real killer for PV alone unless you go bananas in scale. A smallish wind turbine would help a lot there if you have space and location. Otherwise it's generator time.

None of this makes financial sense and adding batteries for self consumption is worse for the environment than using the grid if available - they cost more inefficiency than grid export, and they cost energy to make. Also if you scope the system to work in spring with a few cloudy days in a row, you are going to waste vast generating potential on sunny days if you can't export the surplass to the grid.

Although if you mean an electrically heated shower it's going to be more expensive unless you run it at half power and fit a heat recovery/exchanger like the Recoh-Vert to get your temperature up, because you start to need a very big inverting capacity.

In reply to The Lemming:

Have you got a lamp post on the street outside your front yard?

In reply to birdie num num:

As it happens, yes I do.

How could I hide the wires?

In reply to The Lemming:


How fast can you pedal ?

In reply to mountain.martin:


We tried for the first winter we were up here, but we are at approx 330m elevation and can spend days at a time in cloud during bad weather. Started getting damp problems in the house due to condensation forming from trying to dry cloths. Of course it is possible because the cottage was built before tumble dryers were invented, but a large amount of roof, external wall and internal wall insulation has been added over the years to bring it up to modern energy efficiency standards and that all effect ventilation and condensation formation.

In reply to SAF:

Ok, sounds like your situation is a bit different, I live on the pembrokeshire coast, can be pretty damp in the winter, but never gets that cold.

In reply to The Lemming:
how many hamsters can you manage?
I think if you were to go minimalist they yes feasibly you could go off grid for electricity, combination of wind turbine and pv solar panels, however if you run tv, power shower, washing machine, pc etc then its not really going to work. Compromises are needed.