only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the grid for peak loads and just not run an oven and washing machine at the same time during grid blackouts.
It does require a 21st century house - led lighting (but it's 2015 - who still uses incandescent except for those places where you don't turn on the lights more than 4 times a year anyway?), energy-conscious appliances, moderate need for A/C (sane insulation and ventilation, localized and intelligently controlled A/C needs - i.e. no 'bring all room in my 3000 square feet sheet rock and tin roof house down to 75 degrees when it's 110 degrees outside'). But whoever doesn't have that, has options to start reducing their bills that are much better than buying energy packs.
> only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time
You obviously don't live where it's hot. I live in Houston, TX and while I rarely run the A/C right now, in another month it's going to run on average 15 minutes per hour, every hour, for 3-4 months straight. Highs in the low 90s to high 100s and lows in the 80s (F).
I have 2.5 tons of A/C which is pretty moderate. The condenser draws something like 3kW with an 8kW surge and the furnace fan is another 500 watts. I live in a fairly modest house compared to a lot of people, I'm sure there are places that 5 tons is more common.
In California where humidity isn't really a problem and it tends to cool off more at night and there's nearly always great solar, this seems like a great solution. But don't forget that not everywhere in the world is the target market. There are some places that are very different in terms of electrical consumption.
I guess that my phrasing of "any residential house" is a bit unfortunate, and that 'the majority of all residential houses' would have been better, but that doesn't take away from the fact that with one extra of these units + 10k Wp of solar panels, you could power your AC's with power to spare to be stored in the battery pack, which you can then use to power the AC at night. Many people use AC's as a counterpoint to 2kW battery packs, whereas actually it's one of the more appropriate cases to use solar panels combined with (relatively) cheap local storage for nighttime consumption!
How much is your power bill in summer? Must be $300+, going on 500 during the hottest months? At that rate, you'll make back the $20k + $10k that 10k Wp + 2 of these batteries would cost you in what, 5 to 7 years? Add financing costs and you'll be at breakeven in 10 years, not counting possible government grants.
> How much is your power bill in summer? Must be $300+, going on 500 during the hottest months? At that rate, you'll make back the $20k + $10k that 10k Wp + 2 of these batteries would cost you in what, 5 to 7 years?
No, here in Houston we've got "deregulated" power in a completely reasonable way. One company owns the lines and handles recording the meters. They charge about $0.015/kWh for this. Then there are about 100 companies that offer electricity in a multitude of different ways. I'm paying $0.08/kWh delivered to my "door" so my worst months are only $150 or so.
Your idea is a nice one, except that I would need more panels and at least 2x the batteries/inverters. If I need 3kW CONSTANT to run the AC then 3kW PEAK doesn't do me any good.
> but that doesn't take away from the fact that with one extra of these units + 10k Wp of solar panels, you could power your AC's with power to spare to be stored in the battery pack
Not really. Look I know Tesla is awesome, and solar is awesome. I'm interested in both. But the economics really aren't here yet in Houston because of how cheap power is, because there's not a state owned utility screwing us bigtime. Houston has a lot of problems to be sure but power prices aren't one of them.
It's a really strange paradox that, in places where it gets very hot during the day, we're drawing tons and tons of energy from the grid to cool the house precisely at the time of the day when even more energy is pouring down on us freely from the skies.
Seriously, A/C is basically Universe's most heavy-handed hint that we should use more solar.
LED's are available in various color temperatures, including 2700K (commonly referred to as 'warm white' which is basically the temperature of incandescent). It's true that the dollar-bin Chinese LED's have all sorts of bad characteristics that used to be associated with all things LED - pale color, bad spread, bad (or no) dimming capabilities, etc.
It's 2015 though - take a 20$ Philips Master LED for example (I decided upon those for myself so I looked into them more heavily; I have about 20 in use now, with another few boxes in my basement awaiting installation). The GU10 socket halogen-replacement version is available in 3 temperatures and 3 spread bundles, has a 20k burn hour rating (vs 1-2k for incandescent!) and can be dimmed very well using a 50$ leading edge electronic dimmer.
I'm no tree hugger - even purely economical (apart from the convenience of not having to replace lamps every year), in 2015 it doesn't make any economic sense to buy incandescent (in those places where it's possible to buy them at all...) for all purposes where the light is used on a 'regular' basis (more than an hour a day or so).
Of course it does require an initial 'investment'. But one that would be spread over 1 or 2 years - the normal replacement cycle of incandescent bulbs. Throwing out working incandescent bulbs to replace them with LED is not rational either, of course.
Color temperature is nowhere near everything. Or rather, it would be, were LEDs actually anywhere near a blackbody in terms of radiation output over the visible spectrum. But they aren't. Nowhere near.
There is no every-day use case where the difference in light perception from an incandescent bulb is different, or even distinguishable without measurement, from an LED bulb. Feel free to try it yourself in a light studio, or otherwise, please cite any studies with modern lamps that conclude that the 'light quality' (by whatever metric) of an incandescent bulb is higher (that is, 'higher' as in 'makes a material difference for normal use cases', not 'in the lab using our spectrometer we measured a difference').
As always, there are people (analogous to 'vinyl produce a richer sound' idiots) who have 'opinions' on light quality, but well, we all know what they say about 'opinions'. In 2015, it's plain nonsense to take 'light quality' as a reason not to use LED light for domestic purposes, full stop.
The subjective experience of a home lit with incandescents is very different than one lit with LEDs. I don't care if the color temperature is the same. Things just look different. The bulbs cast their light differently.
There may not be a difference in "light quality", photons are photons, but if you convert a home from one to the other things will look different, and you may prefer one way or the other.
And don't forget about fixtures that were designed to work with clear incandescent bulbs for aesthetic reasons. LED bulbs will look downright hideous in those even when the lights are off.
There are people who like how vinyl sounds better because they like the hiss and the pops, not because they fall for audiophile silliness. The same holds for lighting.
Yes, but being unwilling to spend 1 day adjusting to a different look is a pretty silly reason to continue to run a bunch of spaceheaters in your house that, as a byproduct, happen to produce some light.
I don't like the "warm" light from LEDs, either, which is 2700-3000K. However, now I use 4500K "natural/neutral light" LEDs. I can't describe how much nicer it is than incandescent light.
It's "sunny middle of the day" light. It's brilliant and I love it. I could never use anything else now. Just make sure it's 4500k.
I thought so too until I discovered the Philips Corepro bulbs. I replaced every single bulb in my house with them last year. They're a massive improvement on the CFLs we had before. The only thing that took some getting used to was the lack of light shining upwards - ie illuminating the ceilings.
(I know this reads like a sales pitch but I am genuinely just a fan)
In my experience, while it's true its hard to find the right LEDs, it's certainly not impossible. Try some out - you might be surprised. The biggest challenge is that most of what's sold as "warm white" is nothing of the sort, and you might not be able to pick the cheapest LEDs if you're picky about the colour.
There are LED bulbs with very high CRI scores now. Before those existed it did indeed make sense not to switch to CFL or LED. (Though halogen/xenon make more sense than pure incandescent.)
only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the grid for peak loads and just not run an oven and washing machine at the same time during grid blackouts.
It does require a 21st century house - led lighting (but it's 2015 - who still uses incandescent except for those places where you don't turn on the lights more than 4 times a year anyway?), energy-conscious appliances, moderate need for A/C (sane insulation and ventilation, localized and intelligently controlled A/C needs - i.e. no 'bring all room in my 3000 square feet sheet rock and tin roof house down to 75 degrees when it's 110 degrees outside'). But whoever doesn't have that, has options to start reducing their bills that are much better than buying energy packs.