How much electricity consumption is too much? Is my home OTT?

matelodave

Scot_39 said:

HorseWhisperer said:

lohr500 said:

You could try switching off all the freezers and fridges for say 5 or 6 hours and then back on. 
Then review your half hourly graphs again to see what impact it made.
If you don't open the fridge/freezer doors during the period without power, I don't think the contents will come to much harm. Especially if they aren't in a warm room, given the ambient temperatures at the moment. 

Good tip, though not sure I want to risk turning off freezers as they are loaded with home grown meat. It would be interesting to find out how much energy they need to get back up to -18 after 5 hours though. Maybe I will move all meat out of one of the freezers and leave only veg suff in there, then test it and see. Thanks!

If I home freeze something from the supermarket I am normally told by packet instructions to use it within 1 month.

Only stuff supplied frozen has long dates.

Never really understood the distinction.

generally because commercial freezers are much colder and have the capacity to freeze food a lot faster than a domestic unit.

The little compressor on the back of a home freezer will have far less capacity to extract heat from whatever you are trying to freeze compared with a ginormous industrial unit

I'd guess that your average home freezer would take several  hours  to freeze a lump of meat right through to the centre (probably more if you bung in a lot all at once)  whereas, it's more than likely achieved within a few minutes when done with a commercial blast freezer. 

HorseWhisperer

QrizB said:

HorseWhisperer said:

Our plan is to cover our 3 bay, SW facing  garage roof with solar panels (will take at least 20, if not more).

Per your other thread, 20 panels is ~10kW and should cost no more than £9k (ideally less).

When you said you'd have to spend £14k, I'd assumed that you had space for roughly double that.

Our budget is £14k for solar panels. The garage roof is 10m x 4m = 40sqm facing SW with no obstructions/windows. We could also possibly put a few on the NE facing side to catch the dawn to 10am sunshine as it is completely unshaded. I've calculated we can fit 18 on the SW facing side. And if we can get it within the budget we could also add about 8 to the SW & W facing house roof (dormers cause a space problem there).

Qyburn

Our barn roof is around 6m by 25m, but we're restricted by SSEN export limit so the panels only occupy about 35% of the available space. One slightly unintuitive thing I noticed is that that they still generate even when the sun is behind the building. I was originally thinking of putting some panels facing East, and some West but now I'm not sure that would be worthwhile.