I hate to say it, but we have hooked on to the grid. Well, we have an outlet, outside, with nothing plugged in. The house and kids are growing, we use ever more energy and I have less time to implement. We still don’t have a root cellar which would be the perfect spot to keep batteries from freezing, and would trigger our investment in a good bunch of lithium. And so until then it’s only 3 batteries keeping us going, and really they do great, but in the winter with shorter days, more cover and colder weather, we have used the generator. And so the idea with having access to the grid is to replace that, and in general having one more option to fill batteries.
I am dead worried about complacency, I really don’t like the idea that it’s right there waiting to be used and easy. In reality, the last car we bought should have been electric. We didn’t have the capacity to “fuel” one though, it would have been nice to have had the grid option then. I still very much have the intention to fuel one with the extra solar array that’s been sitting in the shed for a while now, but at least if push comes to shove, we can still get the car now and experiment with increased solar later. That is one thing about home grown solar, with change comes a transitional time of experimentation and learning lessons the hard way. Which is a bigger deal when talking about mobility (AKA me waving my hands explaining to Nicole why her car doesn’t move).
Another hard truth is that we’ll never have enough storage to run AC in the house through the night. We’ve done wonders with running it during the day, taking a cold shower in the evening, and fanning cold air in at night. If you give us a Summer like 2025 every year, no problem. Seared in our memory though is a brutal heat wave which lasted for days and offered no respite at night. We want to be better placed to tackle future heat waves, and the grid means having the option to run AC through the night.
The house is still solar and autonomous, the grid is only an extra decoupled input we can tap into when it makes sense. But we’re no longer as off grid anymore. I’m confident we’ll keep growing our array and experimenting, I’m genuinely curious about all things solar.
