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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >There is no free lunch .... (Don)

Seems like a good time to chime in since the power just come back on.  
During the month of January we had power exactly half the days. This, says I, 
is 
the canary in the mine as far as the crumbling infrastructure.  This power 
company has done nearly no maintenance on its lines or right of way for 
twenty years.  Windstorms today took out the power yet again.

Though I was pleased that at the beginning of at lest two of the many power 
failures, we'd be up and about and half way though the morning routine when 
someone would say, "Is the power out again?"  "I don't know, let me switch 
something on and see."

Which brings me to my point that having a personal "off grid" power system 
was never anything that captured my imagination.  I've got an old steam 
engine that I once had rigged to a generator for emergency power.  It only 
cost 
us some branches and deadfall, but bringing that sucker up to steam (it 
would run idle on 10psi but needed more than 100psi to do anything useful) 
was 
so much trouble that we came to perfer doing without power than fool with it.

On this dubious system, one is charged for the first $7 worth of 
electricity whether one uses it or not and then by the KWH (as is the case in 
almost 
all systems).  Other than playing around with a steam engine (which I was 
going to do anyway), I've never seen the economic advantage in spending 
megabucks to be able to thumb my nose at the power company.

It's the Arkansas Traveller Syndrome ... you know the folksong where the 
traveller comes upon the old man playing the fiddle during a rainstorm while 
the roof of his house leaks bucketsful.  When he advises the fiddler to fix 
his roof, he says he can't because it is raining.  So the traveller tells him 
to fix it when it's sunny.  

"Now git away afore you give me a pain
 My roof never leaks when it doesn't rain."

As Don has pointed out with the numbers, the amount of power you can 
realize from solar, wind, hydro is very, very modest.  To go completely "off 
grid" 
you are going to have to reduce your electical consumption to a minimum,  a 
small fraction of the typical household.  If you do that, then your 
dependence on electricity is so small it scarcely justifies an elaborate 
system to 
provide it ... just stay on the grid and pay the tiny minimum charge.

My house is wired for a 200 amp service and the power company even (under a 
freebie program) put in the underground cable from the transformer to the 
meter base.  But to this day, 20 years after the power was installed, the 
house is still being run from a 40 amp temporary hookup.  I've replaced the 
yard pole box three times but never attached to the 200 amp service (and I 
get 
a reduction on my property tax since by state defintion the house is thus 
... "unfinished").  I never intend on upgrading the service, we use so little 
electricity there is really no point.

My earnest advice to aspiring off-gridders is to be brutally honest with 
the math.  Calculate how much power you can reasonably get from your proposed 
alternate system and then try living on that much power for a few months 
even before you bolt down the first solar panel.  You may find that reducing 
the use that far is so close to reducing it to zero that it's no odds.

It makes more sense to me to become fascinated over machining or forging my 
own tools, weaving my own cloth, cobbling my own shoes, 
carding-spinning-knitting my own socks than to make my own electricity.  I 
find it more freeing 
to cut wood, plow a garden, and put up hay without IC engines than I would 
runnng an electric light off grid.  I'm not doing all those things (some of 
them) but the romance of being off-grid is far below all of them on my list 
of what makes me self-sufficient.


James</HTML>