Climate change

Flip-flops - The batteries alone add a significant cost to the system. Adding to that is the fact that it is one more thing that will eventually fail and need to be replaced. The Hybrid system will allow you to get energy credits for excess power, but will add years to the ROI for no good reason, unless your grid power is unreliable or you're prone to natural disasters. If either of those were the case, I'd probably look at off-grid systems.

As a ballpark for the size system I'm looking at (10KW), it would be at least $6K+ for the batteries alone, and that would only give me a day or so worth of reserve. At some point, I expect EV cars to fully integrate into the system, meaning they will become the battery bank for solar systems. An EV car battery could give 2-3 days of reserve for the average home, as far as I can tell. The deal with battery sizing is you need to be able charge it at about the rate you consume from it. If you get a run of cloudy weather while on the battery, you may drain your batteries faster than you can charge them.

Current - I will search YouTube for the person mentioned. I may have already seen some of hiis stuff and just didn't realize it.

Someone - I'm not sure I understand. Would they not allow you to pull the permit/s yourself? I still need to pull and pay for a permit for work I do, but there are no repercussions when I sell so long as I do that, and in theory, it should be as safe as having a licensed person do it if the inspector does their job.

@mayhem & EA, thanks. I've been putting off doing the work to research this but I guess I have to start now. I like the idea of that hybrid system

@Andrew

"It's so common that some of us start to think maybe the crisis' aren't actually real, and it's just a scheme by the government."

Either the government is a genius for making all these schemes and getting people to buy into it or do you believe all the people in the government are morons/idiots?

EA,

What the hell are you talking about?

@Andrew

It's interesting. Now you are calling the people in government geniuses. The ability to fabricate fake events to extract money from you and to restrict your rights is not something a moron could do.

OR

Are you now going to go back and state that they are all morons and idiots?

EA,

You're the one that brought it up when I ACCURATELY described how every "crisis" that we have is sold to us with the solution of more money and power for the government. It's so common that some of us start to think maybe the crisis' aren't actually real, and it's just a scheme by the government.

@Flip and @Mayhem

On youtube, look into Will Prowse.

The guy goes over TONS of things. Tests the shit out of batteries for storage and tests the shit out of inverters. Goes over what can be done to be 'legal' (i.e. the inverter needs a UL sticker on it.)

Really interesting just watching the guy explain stuff left and right.

God bless Texas , I built my home , put in my own sewage system . Did have a licensed electrician . Did my own plumbing ……No permits , everyone here in my county does it that way ….We don’t have money for inspectors.

FlipFlops - I know that in NH at least, a homeowner can do their own electrical but they still have to pull a permit and have the work inspected. I had considered doing my own install as well, and absolutely would if I had a ranch vs a full 2-story house. There are YouTubes on just about every aspect of the various system types.

There are a bazillion YouTubes on this topic in general, but some leave a lot to be desired because they don't always explain things in ways that someone coming in with little to no knowledge can fully understand.

In addition to what I mentioned already, there are grid-tie, off-grid, and hybrid systems. I'm looking at a grid-tie system. The main thing with these is that you don't need a battery bank. If you produce more power than you use, it runs your meter backwards and you get energy credits. The down side is that you actually lose your solar power if the grid power goes down. This is for safety reasons so that you don't backfeed the grid from your PV panels.

Batteries are a significant expense in a solar system. You can overcome this "loss of solar power when grid goes down" limitation with a Hybrid system. This is one where the PV panels actually charge your batteries, and you draw your power through an inverter from your batteries rather than the panels directly. In both the grid-tie and hybid systems, you need to sync the power you're producing with the grid. That is not required in an off-grid system, but if you need more power than you produce/save, you go without for a while.

For the extra expense of the batteries and such, it's cheaper to just power your house from a portable generator if the power rarely goes out where you live. I have a generator and I maybe use it once every 3-4 years or so, and it was < $500 for a little used 9750W generator that will easily power my whole house.

If you want to see something REALLY interesting, Google "wood gas generator", but now we're back getting into something that isn't as environmentally friendly ;-) As far as I can tell, it is not meant to power a generator long term from wood gas, but this will blow your mind if you've never heard of wood gas. It is actually very old tech.

@mayhem. Thanks for your posts on the solar stuff. I need to slowly start researching some of that myself and I'm going to install it myself except for the hard stuff but I need an electrician for but I want to understand it completely

@Andrew

What you described is interesting because if you think about it, what is the difference if it is a city, county, state, or federal? All it is is how local you want to be. If you are arguing about electing, in Broward county the sheriff is elected and where I live now, it is an elected position. What happened in Broward was that almost 1/2 the cities in the county did not have a police force. They hired out to the county. It turned into a shit show. The city didn't get what it wanted. Because the county sheriff's office was finite in resources, some cities that hired them didn't get coverage because another city was getting the majority of the resources.

However, comparing local community police actions to that of climate change is way off. That water you are drinking comes from a different county. Are you ok with that county polluting the water at the exit of Hardin county? The climate does not understand the man-made concept of borders. The climate knows only one border, the world. What happens in Greenland impacts you in OH and me in CA.

I have been looking more into solar system design. In case anyone else was going down this path, the industry standard right now seems to be using Enphase microinverters vs Solar Edge optimizers on the panels.

The microinverters convert the DC to AC at the panel, and then you run the AC into a combiner box that will also sync to the grid. The optimizers remain as DC coming from the panel and feed to an inverter that converts the DC to AC and syncs to the grid.

Both the microinverters and the optimizers allow for individual panel monitoring and control. Without them, the panels get wired in series groups and can only output whatever the output is of the lowest producing panel in that group. So, if you had one panel only producing 50% of it's max because it was partially shaded or faulty, all panels in that group (string) would only be capable of 50% output.

While the microinverters are more expensive than the optiimizers, the inverter needed for the optimizer setup is that much more expensive than the combiner box that a microinverter setup uses, to the point where it pretty much offsets the difference. Also, with the optimizer setup, the inverter becomes a single point of failure, meaning you get no power if that fails. It's also the weak link in the system

Another advantage is that you're running AC from the panels to the combiner box, which is something most electricians are more familiar and comfortable with.

EroticAmazon,

Actually I do, kind of. My idea for law enforcement will never happen, but in my ideal America we would ELIMINATE all city police departments. Get rid of every one that exists, and shift all resources to the COUNTY. Every city is in a county, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel with law enforcement. All law enforcement would come from the sheriff department. The sheriff is directly elected by the people, and their only responsibility is law enforcement. That's different from voting for the mayor of your city because that election is about other issues than the police. The sheriff is directly responsible for their officers and directly accountable to the voters, so it's in their interest to please their constituents. Every county would get exactly what the majority of voters want for law enforcement style. Some would be almost Nazi, and some would be totally liberal.

So YES, as with climate change, which is nonsense, I'm generally in favor of having the problems that affect a community decided by that community. Certain fields of science have become nothing but bullshit to be used for the purpose of gaslighting people into accepting more authoritarian rule. We just had two years of that on full display with covid, and climate change has been building for a lot longer.

I was thinking the "food waste" tie into the topic was that, if climate change continues, we will have trouble growing as much food as we do now, in the places we currently grow it in. Right now, water for irrigation is a major concern. That, and the fact that we keep making more mouths to feed.

It was very interesting to see Flip's comment about leftovers, because it goes right in line with my thinking about any fixes being more acceptable when there is a favorable monetary incentive attached vs environmental impact.

Different subject, but along the monetary incentive lines is that one thing that would go a huge way towards cleaning up the oceans of all of the plastics is if there were some way to harvest and repurpose all those plastics in a way that provided a profit. While some people are concerned about climate change and the environment, it will definitely get more traction if someone can make a buck off of it because we, as a society, seem to be more $$$-friendly than eco-friendly. Capitalism at it's finest, or perhaps in this case, its worst.

Oh, and I don't know about pick your own, but one of the local family owned large farms here donates rows to the biggest area food bank, which arranges for volunteer pickers, and there's also a program that does backyard produce rescue.

Since farm margins are so slim, life could be better for family farmers with state and federal tax benefits for donating excess produce, but that's not something that's gotten much traction yet.

I cook for leftovers, always have. They don't always appear in the same way they started though. I can't say it's something I learned at home, but poverty teaches some hard lessons and I was in my mid-20s before I got to the point where the month ran out of days before I ran out of money.

I'd recommend batch cooking - there are lots of online resources - where yesterday's chili turns into tomorrow's tamale pie, while the rest of the batch goes in the freezer for the next month, and today's roast chicken is tomorrow's salad with chunks of chicken. It's still leftovers, but without the tiresomeness of eating the same thing day after day (not something I mind, but then I generally eat salad with a protein four days a week) and Friday's nachos.

Admittedly I'm one of the people that rarely eats leftovers. Hard to believe a fat Italian guy doesn't eat leftovers but I know I'm strange. It's something I have been working on to help save money. Wouldn't surprise me that ~60% of food gets wasted. Think of the waste during prep and then what doesn't get finished. Like most here, my grandmother would cringe at the waste in my mom's house which is probably a lot higher than my own.

GGMM - " I discovered a couple of articles and tables that suggested that 61% of food waste in North America was on the part of the consumer."

That seems high, but wouldn't totally surprise me. We've come across a number of people that flat out refuse to eat leftovers. In many of those cases, they feel like it is "beneath" them, which is annoying. Certain leftovers (like some Italian dishes) actually taste better as leftovers than they did as the first serving.

One area of food waste that is likely difficult to factor in is farm produce. We go to a "pick your own" farm to pick veggies for our homemade salsa, and it's easily over 50% of the tomatoes that rot on the vine/ground because they are not picked in time and/or have some blemeshes. There are other things like zuccini and summer squash that just get too big before anyone picks them, and then people don't want them.

The farm does have their own pickers as well, but not enough to avoid a large amount of waste. Not sure if/how that translates to other farms that don't do "pick your own"". That bothers me less than the people that buy food, cook way more than they need and then throw the rest away. Same with those that order way more than they can possibly eat at resaurants and won't eat leftovers.

I'm still on the approved list, so it's apparently just you, EA. ;)

Grocery stores in several states work with food banks on what is called grocery rescue. Things past their sell date, but still good for a couple more days. That reduces waste from that part of the food chain, but we need to do more of that and we need to do it efficiently (which means that it's voluntary, gives a tax advantage, and legal rather than mandated).

Other states allow restaurants to donate their surplus food to feeding programs (food banks aren't really set up for storing or distributing cooked food). That also helps reduce waste, but, again, it's not universally allowed.

Also, as part of double checking my facts - food security is one of my interests, but I like backup before citing facts - I discovered a couple of articles and tables that suggested that 61% of food waste in North America was on the part of the consumer.

Wasted food was mentioned, and for whatever reason, it bothers me to see so much thrown out. If you've ever been on a cruise ship, the amount of food thrown away is unbelievable. Go to any restaurant and see how much food goes uneaten and is wasted. Grocery stores must have lots of spoilage, but we don't really see that.

I am rare in a lot of ways these days, and one is that you will very rarely see me not finish something I put on my plate at home, or if I can't while eating out, I'll take it home and eat it as leftovers. On a scale of 1 - 100 for food waste with 100 being the worst, I'm probably under a 5.

It's not just food either. More and more of our household items are thrown out rather than fixed. It's kind of a downside of capitalism because sales drive everything, and you can't have sales of goods and jobs making those good if people are fixing those goods rather than replacing them. This is kind of where economy and climate change intersect. We know we have manufacturing processes that aren't environmentally friendly as well as producing vast amounts of landfill materials, and that is mostly by design.

Case in point. I had a tabletop ice maker break. Rather than throw it away, I found a few YouTubes on repairing them and was able to diagnose the problem, order the part, and fix it. Most people would have thrown it away and bought a new one. The drive for me tends to be monetary (as I have heated with coal), but if there is a way for me to save a buck AND help the environment, I'm going to be all over that, and hoping others would too. I think that's going to be the real key to climate change is to show people a better AND less expensive (or at least costs the same) way of doing things.

@Molly

I guess being called out for the bullshit will not cite sources was enough to get me blocked.

Oh well.

@EA...WTF are you? Besides a boring old man..Good Luck and goodbye

"The US cannot today grow enough food to feed its people"

Bold statement, but not true. The US produces enough food to feed the US population several times over. We just waste a ton of it, mostly in grocery stores, restaurants, and at home. We also have capacity to grow more, but it's not economically feasible without even more government supports than are currently available to farmers.

So, since that's all common knowledge, easily checked and cited, where are you looking to get your information?

"...maybe look into wheat numbers"

Bringing wheat in as if that's a factor does not make it true (wheat production will not cover the loss of Ukraine wheat this year, but it's still sufficient for US use).

But I'd be interested in seeing why you think wheat is an issue.

@Ro

Get over yourself.
Here let me give you a cut and paste, and just a TINY part is mine.

Now RO was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. RO saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So RO thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “RO! RO!”

And RO said, “Here I am.”

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Then he said, “I am the God of your father,[a] the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, RO hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God

And God told RO, the United States can't grow enough food to feed its citizens.

That must be the source you thought would be belitted.

The question of whether the US is a net importer or exporter of "food" is a complicated one. The problem is that net "argicultural" imports and exports include feed stocks for livestock and fuel and are based on economic value.

Under the current definitions, and according to the USDA, the US has been at or above net importer status before, both in 2006 and 2021. Current projections are that the US will become a net importer of agricultural products within the next year. My take is that such long term projections are so speculative as to be meaningless, given the degree to which politics greatly and directly, through the farm bill, influences Ag policy.