> i very much fear arriving at a summer house where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks.
Usually there's little any single person can do, but this waste of electricity is very selfish considering climate change.
Usually there's little any single person can do, but this waste of electricity is very selfish considering climate change.
You have that effect in many areas of life. A quite obvious example is working out. Of course it won't make much of a difference if you skip today's workout or abort your 40 min run today halfway cause you don't feel like it. But it's the mindset/attitude. It makes you a quitter. It enables you to do the same thing again. And again. And in the end, the cumulative damage of the change in mindset is magnitudes worse than the single event.
Ironically that is what kept me from setting up solar power. Being in Scandinavia, solar has a somewhat limited potential given that days are 7 hours long during winter, and December often has less than 20 hours of sunshine in total. My calculations for the "payback" time of the solar panels said that _MAYBE_ they would have saved something before their "expiry date" some 20 years into the future.
Considering the "energy and material waste" involved in creating solar panels, this task can be handled by energy companies much more efficiently than i ever can.
I am still considering a share in a windmill though :)
Everyone should be calculating payback on these investments every couple of years, because the calculus changes depending on incentives/tech/other factors (e.g. EV purchases, or massive cost of living changes)
First Google result: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/busted-common-sol...
We have an annual power consumption of 6-8k kWh, with about half during winter (heat pump, yay). More energy is required during night time due to dropping temperatures and it being dark, so realistically, I could probably save about half.
At normal energy prices of €0.3/kWh, that means I would save €1200/year, and that’s without taking into account reduced electricity taxes for electric heating.
Taking those into account, all electricity used beyond 4000 kWh/year would be around €0.12/kWh. Taking that into account, I could save €480/year, still assuming I could save 4000 kWh/year out of 8000 total.
A solar panel installation _without_ batteries is about €13500, and saving €480/year means it would take 28 years to get back the investment.
I’m aware batteries can change that equation somewhat in my favor, but it’s ever harder to calculate anything usable with those as it depends if the battery can get charged during the day. In any case, a solar panel installation with batteries is around €20000.
Since I bought an electric car I've been drooling over the idea of having the car powered by the sun. I go into the office only on occasion so I don't need to charge fast either. But you need an available roof and an okay topography.
But in Scandinavia, I bet most energy goes to heating so improving insulation and adding ground thermal will probably be more efficient. The idea of a sun powered car is just so enticing, however. It's kinda sci-fi.
This is Denmark, where a large part of our power grid is based on renewables, and backup power is based on natural gas. There is no coal involved. When we import power it's from Norway/Sweden or Germany, so either renewables or nuclear. We're not at Norwegian CO2 levels (yet), but it's getting better :)
You can check for yourself here : https://app.electricitymap.org/map
> Since I bought an electric car I've been drooling over the idea of having the car powered by the sun.
Denmark has outlawed sales of new ICE cars from 2030, so at that point solar will make MUCH more sense, as i can charge my car for "free", and the time to ROI will be much shorter.
> But in Scandinavia, I bet most energy goes to heating so improving insulation and adding ground thermal will probably be more efficient.
I thought so to, but currently, in no small part due to the Ukraine situation, lots of people are replacing oil and natural gas heaters with heat pumps or central heating, and the central heating providers are installing large heat pumps as well.
As part as getting a heat pump, my house (built 1970's and renovated 2010's) has a total heat demand of roughly 13000 kWh. Assuming a heat pump with a SCOP of 3.5, that means i will need about 3700 kWh of electricity to heat it, which means that our total electricity consumption ends up around 7500 kWh, so about half the energy (in my case) being used for heating.
In my experience, anyway.
We tested it, and with our usual usage pattern of using the summerhouse every 2 weeks, the brand new fridge uses less power while powered for the 12 days between departure and arrival, than it does cooling down when powered on at arrival.
Despite being brand new, it uses 6-8 hours to get from 18C to 5C. I guess because it's brand new it is well insulated, so less cooling power is needed once it's cooled down, which translates to a weaker compressor with less power consumption.
As for the Raspberry Pi, it runs idle for 99% of the time, consuming _at most_ 1.15W. That amounts to 0.8 kWh in a month, which is about as much as a TV uses in 2.5 hours, or about a quarter the power consumption of a Sonos One Speaker sitting idle [1].
The total power consumption of the summerhouse uninhabited is ~1.8kWh/day, which includes the heat pump, fridge, internet modem and router, Raspberry Pi, Security Camera and a couple of hubs for IoT.
I started leaving a gallon jug of water (frozen) in mine as it helps give it enough thermal mass to even out the spikes.
My chest freezer maxes out at 180 watts TDP for instance, which is pretty anemic if you’re trying to freeze a pot of room temperature stew.
Owning a "summer" house?
Moving yourself to the summer house every two weeks probably has far more climate impact than the fridge.
Taking to a logical conclusion: you shouldn’t have a summer house at all. (That’s not a position that I hold, but one that seems more logical than “have a summer house; just empty out and unplug the fridge while you’re not there…”)