Greener Bunkers
Jun. 1st, 2021 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: apocalypse, (arguably) poverty]
Remember how we were talking about hybrid solar recently? Being able to switch between the normal electrical grid and an independent one-building system, allowing you to merely ration electricity in a crisis instead of going without altogether?
If you look closely at the latest new home-retrofit program, you find that the Canadian government wants to encourage more households to have hybrid solar systems, citing "climate resiliency".
I'm glad to hear that [concern over how centralised our power grid is] is going mainstream, even if in practice I suspect what will happen in our own case is "use up the entire reimbursement cap on upgrading from a 28-year-old methane-fueled furnace to an electric heat pump; hybrid solar system remains at #21 on the list of things to save up for". (Besides, money is fungible: $5,000 for [things we were going to have to buy sooner or later anyway] frees up $5,000 of our money for working down the List. (Replacing the furnace wasn't already explicitly on the List, although #17 is "check which other aspects of the house need to be repaired or upgraded" and the size of emergency fund called for by #6† would be enough to cover a replacement in the event that one was abruptly needed.))
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*looks at notice of "overwhelming positive response"* ...assuming we can even get in. There's, uh...*checks census records*...about 10% as many slots as there are detached houses, let alone other qualifying dwellings. And for best effect we need to do the Home Winterproofing Program *first*: you should upgrade insulation before upgrading your heating system, so that you know how much heating capacity you're actually going to need (also, it looks like we'll be able to show the post-Winterproofing-Program audit results to the Greener Homes folks rather than having to do a separate initial audit for them).
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†Which we already have: I've left it on the List to remind us of how much buffer to leave when buying other List items. (Currently #1 is a smaller emergency fund left in place for the same reason, while #2 - 5 are waiting for non-financial prerequisites (mostly pandemic-related).) ↩
Remember how we were talking about hybrid solar recently? Being able to switch between the normal electrical grid and an independent one-building system, allowing you to merely ration electricity in a crisis instead of going without altogether?
If you look closely at the latest new home-retrofit program, you find that the Canadian government wants to encourage more households to have hybrid solar systems, citing "climate resiliency".
I'm glad to hear that [concern over how centralised our power grid is] is going mainstream, even if in practice I suspect what will happen in our own case is "use up the entire reimbursement cap on upgrading from a 28-year-old methane-fueled furnace to an electric heat pump; hybrid solar system remains at #21 on the list of things to save up for". (Besides, money is fungible: $5,000 for [things we were going to have to buy sooner or later anyway] frees up $5,000 of our money for working down the List. (Replacing the furnace wasn't already explicitly on the List, although #17 is "check which other aspects of the house need to be repaired or upgraded" and the size of emergency fund called for by #6† would be enough to cover a replacement in the event that one was abruptly needed.))
---
*looks at notice of "overwhelming positive response"* ...assuming we can even get in. There's, uh...*checks census records*...about 10% as many slots as there are detached houses, let alone other qualifying dwellings. And for best effect we need to do the Home Winterproofing Program *first*: you should upgrade insulation before upgrading your heating system, so that you know how much heating capacity you're actually going to need (also, it looks like we'll be able to show the post-Winterproofing-Program audit results to the Greener Homes folks rather than having to do a separate initial audit for them).
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†Which we already have: I've left it on the List to remind us of how much buffer to leave when buying other List items. (Currently #1 is a smaller emergency fund left in place for the same reason, while #2 - 5 are waiting for non-financial prerequisites (mostly pandemic-related).) ↩
no subject
Date: 2021-06-09 03:14 pm (UTC)(Good to hear home improvements are going ahead though!)
no subject
Date: 2021-06-09 04:12 pm (UTC)I'm kind of curious how much more life we could eke out of the 31-year-old furnace, 28-year-old secondary freezer, and 14-year-old refrigerator (apparently that is the life expectancy of a refrigerator), but I suspect that all of them are inefficient enough that various official programs will offer to pay for their replacements to get us to stop wasting power on them, and said programs have a very good point. A bit of poking at hardware-store websites suggests that modern secondary freezers consume *an entire kilowatt* less than ours.
(Despite the hundred subtle fingerprints, our electricity consumption is about average. Upon reflection, I suspect that our baseline frugality and our old (read: inefficient) major appliances are cancelling out. I look forward to giving that baseline frugality a chance to shine through. (...especially since last year we made too much to qualify for subsidised electricity this year. Fortunately the income requirements for the gas and electricity audits are a bit more generous, and we still qualify for those.))
Edit: well, to be fair the averaged electricity figure is very possibly assuming a smaller household size, but OTOH a lot of electricity consumption is independent of or otherwise nonlinear with the number of people. If my parents lived alone, they'd have just as many space heaters.