Mikey’s battery desulfator revives batteries and extends their life, reducing what goes to landfill.
Repack. Some batteries can be repacked. Weak cells can be taken out and replaced with strong cells. The devices worth repacking have battery packs that are not too crammed; a crammed device is a difficult refit. Some home appliances and power tools have spacious battery packs worth hacking. Replacement cells can be purchased online, and model numbers can be matched with the cells taken out.
Photovoltaic (PV) Solar
One night, watching the film The End of Suburbia brought home to us the fragility of our country’s power grid. The film made us aware of the variety of forces that affect power, including an Enron power trade that once caused parts of California to experience life-or-death rolling blackouts.
Just before leaving New York City in 2003, we experienced a three-day blackout. During the outage, no one had access to money. We had what was in our pockets. The first day of the blackout was fun. Restaurants gave out free food, knowing their refrigerators were down and the food inside them would go bad anyway. In a moment of poor judgment, Mikey spent his last $26 on a pitcher of lychee sangria for a handful of friends gathered by candlelight at a bar.
By day three, people who lived high up on the 20th and 30th floors of tall buildings were struggling and tired. In the dark they counted the floors as they climbed, in order to know when they reached theirs. People used the remaining charge on cell phones to light their way down dark hallways and to find their apartment doors. Without lift pumps, water stopped flowing to those who lived above the 4th floor, and everyone started to wonder when fresh food would come. Power was returned on the third day, but not before people became aware that we were close to seeing a whole new side of life.
These experiences encouraged us to invest in a PV solar system. Since we were the first in our geographic area to have one, getting it up and running was difficult. When we approached local electricians to do the installation, they’d say, “Never did that before.” Finally one said, “I can read a schematic. Sure, let’s do it.” And we did.
We recommend building a mini system first (see page 270). That way you’ll understand all the issues involved.
Approval by a state electrical inspector matters if you want to receive state refunds on your PV solar installation. We stood to recoup 20 percent of the cost of our system by gaining this approval. The criteria for passing inspection are difficult, especially if you have limited resources. We regularly used parts from a local auto parts store to complete the work because the parts needed were not available. The parts were similar enough to electrical parts, and they worked.
By participating in our installation, we gained valuable experience that we put to good use. Mikey has since installed several solar setups for friends and neighbors, and he regularly advises people who are considering going off-grid.
Mikey was so excited when we got our PV solar panels working to their full potential. He shut off our grid power, turned on our solar power, and ran inside to fire up an air conditioner and swamp cooler.
Once a PV system is set up, it is usually smooth sailing. PV systems are virtually self-running. It is not a pain to live off the grid. What we like about being off-grid:
clean, onsite source of power
no power outages
independence
knowledge about power as part of our lifestyle
the ability to add electric gadgets to our lives, such as electric vehicles
PV Solar Tips
If you wish to get tax deductions offered by state and federal government programs, buy PV solar equipment new. Used equipment disqualifies you from these programs. Do the math, though. Depending on the programs being offered and size of your system, it still might be worth buying used equipment.
Before taking on a photovoltaic solar system to power your home, consider building a mini PV system suitable for camping and road trips. Use it to power lights, cell phones, laptops, and small electronics.
For a larger system that powers a home, all the components are the same. They just scale up.
Some municipalities offer grid ties. Grid ties let you plug into the existing electric grid and sell the excess power you produce back to it. Another option is to store your power in batteries on your own property. There are downsides to grid ties. The per kilowatt price that power companies charge customers for their power use is higher than the price they pay you when they buy the excess power you produce and sell back to them. If your PV solar system is grid-tied, you’ll be charged for any power you use in excess of what you produce. While producing your own power, you can get a surprisingly high electric bill. Another downside is that if the grid goes down, you will lose power even though you are producing power. Storing the power your PV system generates on site allows you to be independent. We chose to store our power in batteries rather than tie into the grid, and we have not regretted this decision.
Do not buy a system until you have an installation plan and an electrician. Find a licensed electrician you can work with. An installation by an unlicensed electrician will disqualify you from state and federal refunds. It is often necessary to have both an installer and an electrician. Know what you can do and what an electrician should do. You can mount the panels, dig the holes for the posts, install a pole mount (if you’re using one), and hook up the batteries.
If doing a pole mount, consider how the panels will be reached and cleaned. Consider the wind patterns where you live, and avoid placement that allows the wind to get under the panels. If you pole-mount your system, consider how deep you will need to dig a hole for it.
Buy batteries after all the equipment is installed and when the system is ready to be plugged in. When batteries sit uncharged over time, crystals form on the lead plates and reduce the batteries’ capacity. Know the dates that the batteries you are buying were made. Don’t buy batteries made more than half a year before your purchase date. Nonsealed lead-acid batteries are considered hazardous materials and are very expensive to ship. Pick them up yourself from the supplier to save money on shipping.
If 220 power is not critical to your lifestyle, don’t bother accommodating it. Adapting a PV system for 220 is expensive.
Don’t run big appliances at night or when you are not producing a lot of power, such as during gray days.
Use power when you have it, because you can’t save it. There are times of year in which you will produce extra power and find yourself seeking ways to use it. At other times of year you will seek to conserve power so as not to run out. You cannot store solar power beyond your batteries’ capacity (the charge controller disconnects to avoid over-charging the batteries). Days with cool temperatures and direct sun produce the most energy.
When you have extra energy, use electric power where you might otherwise use gas. An electric kettle can be used to boil water. We run two electric vehicles: a golf cart for hauling heavy things around a large property and an electric car that we use for short trips around town. When we have extra power, we run appliances such as an electric water distiller and a food dehydrator.
Before buying a PV system, spend a year studying the way that you use power. Read electric bills and find out about the sources of the power you are using. Use a Kill A Watt device to give a reading of the power consumed by the appliance plugged into it. Consider reducing the draw of the appliances that consume the most energy.
Cars and Fuel
Considering the many productive uses of petroleum, burning it for fuel is like burning a Picasso for heat.
— Big Oil Executive
Compared to vehicles with combustion engines, electric vehicles (EVs) need very little maintenance. They need their batteries kept full of water and frequently charged. Batteries can be maintained with just a multimeter; they can be kept running for a long time with a battery desulfator like the one Mikey made and we sell in our online store. Some EV motors are rated for 1 million miles. Tires are the only parts that need reg
ular replacement. Since we do not favor the skill set required to keep combustion engines running and we are comfortable with batteries, EVs are ideal for us. We also live in a small town whose size is a match for the distance an EV can travel before needing to be recharged.
But we also have cars that use biodiesel that we make ourselves. In addition to making our own fuel, Mikey and I regularly repair our vehicles. We change bulbs in the headlights, replace window regulators, maintain batteries, and change the oil and fuel filters. We’ve also replaced our hood latch and recalibrated our electronic keys, to name a couple more repairs.
Most modern vehicles have computers that you can talk to by plugging an On Board Diagnostics (OBD) device into the vehicle’s port. The right OBD device for your specific car can be ordered online. The device will provide error codes and details as to what is in need of repair. Decisions to repair the vehicle yourself hinge on the answers to the following questions:
Is there a tutorial online, a demonstration of someone doing the same repair?
Does the repair require specialized tools?
Are the tools worth acquiring?
Does the repair require a lift?
What’s the cost to have a mechanic fix it if you try to repair it yourself and mess it up?
Will an error cause the vehicle to require towing?
Do you have the time do the repair?
Weigh these answers against the cost of having the car repaired by a mechanic.
When a headlight bulb on our VW Beetle died, we picked up a replacement bulb for $5 from a local auto parts store and had the headlight working in less than 40 minutes. The dealer price is over $70.
Fuel
Few things are more satisfying than independence from petroleum fuel and the stream of events around its production and distribution. The amount you can save by making your own fuel is tremendous — thousands of dollars a year. No more visits to gas stations!
When we first converted an old Mercedes to run on waste vegetable oil (WVO), we had many adventures. In Marfa, Texas, before heading home to Truth or Consequences, we pulled up behind a gas station that was also a diner, hoping to refuel our car from the grease pit in back. I assumed that the oil was a free waste material. So I placed one end of our grease pump into the diner’s grease pit and the other end of the hose in my car’s WVO tank and turned on my self-filtering pump. Since the pump filters the grease while it pumps, we pumped it directly into our converted car’s WVO tank.
I casually filled our Mercedes with WVO from a grease pit behind a gas station while inside the store owner called the cops. We got out of there just in time to avoid being arrested.
Moments later a woman working at the station came out, yelling and waving her arms, a phone pressed to her ear. She paused to shout, “I called the police,” pointed to the phone with her finger, and then returned to the call to review the accuracy of the directions she’d given the police dispatcher. Like Bonnie and Clyde, we bolted from the scene. As we turned off the main road and onto a side street, in my rearview mirror I saw a police car, sirens on, speeding to the scene of the crime.
Never again did I look at WVO as garbage. It is a valuable commodity. Today many biofuel makers pay restaurants for their WVO. Our Bonnie and Clyde episode happened well before the spike in the price of fuel and the stock market crash of 2008; I’m pretty sure that the woman at the station had no idea what we were doing in the grease pit. Today many of the grease pits found behind restaurants are tagged with logos and phone numbers placed on them by the greaser who has dibs on the bounty.
Etiquette is involved in being a collector of WVO. Relationships with restaurants require consideration in both directions. A greaser should promise to be reliable and tidy when picking up WVO. Set a standard and stick to it. The restaurant may promise to have its WVO prepared a certain way for you. When you are on the road, if you choose to refuel from a grease pit, ask permission before pumping. The stuff is messy. It’s proper etiquette to leave no trace behind.
Some restaurants pay money to a monthly service that picks up their WVO. If you replace that service by taking it instead, you will have saved them money. Of course, once a restaurant cancels its pickup service and begins to rely on you, you have to pick up each week or make arrangements if you can’t. Never leave a restaurant owner overflowing with waste oil. If you decide that you no longer need a restaurant’s oil, give that account to another greaser.
When setting up a relationship with a restaurant, try to get the owner to promise to change the fryer oil every week to avoid dirty oil that has no energy left in it. Ask the owner to put cooled oil back into the same 5-gallon tote that it came in when their distributor delivered it to them. This simplifies your pickup process. If they put their oil into a big nasty grease pit in the back of the restaurant, it will be dirty, require more filtering, and be messy to pick up. A ready-to-go tote is tidy and easy. Waste oil has a long shelf life and can be stored for years.
Waste Vegetable Oil and Biodiesel
Waste vegetable oil (WVO) is oil from a restaurant fryer. Filtered WVO has been run through enough filtering that it is appropriate for making biodiesel or running in a car with a conversion kit. Biodiesel is the combination of filtered WVO and a mixture of methanol and lye, minus the glycerin by-product made by the combination. Biodiesel can be run in an ordinary diesel car without any conversion.
Once you are storing WVO at home, you can use it as sealer for outside wood, such as trim on your home, garden beds, and decks. Biodiesel can be used as a solvent and can be burned as fuel in the popular Hawaiian art called poi.
You can run a car on biodiesel during the part of the year when temperatures are over 50°F. At temperatures below that, biodiesel must be diluted with diesel fuel. As temperatures near freezing, all biodiesel should be replaced with diesel fuel.
Tools and Supplies. Designate an outfit for working with waste vegetable oil; it is messy work, and the stains produced by oil are lasting. Always wear protective eyewear and gloves. Never work with biofuel barefoot or with exposed skin. What you’ll need:
digital thermometer
bucket heater (a wand that heats up when plugged into an electric outlet)
filters (old denim jeans)
pump (Golden Fuel Systems makes a One Shot pump that comes in a sturdy Pelican suitcase that has on-board 2-micron filtering. We recommend it.)
funnels
a fuel siphon
goggles
gloves
50-gallon metal drums for storage
5-gallon plastic totes for carrying fuel
Filtering with Waste Denim. Denim is an excellent filter for cleaning waste vegetable oil. Most thrift shops have tons of throwaway denim, jeans too dirty or old to sell. They usually can be obtained free for the asking. There are many techniques for using waste denim to filter WVO. We straddle a pair of jeans — one leg on each side — over a stick of rebar placed across the top of a 50-gallon drum. We tie the pant legs at the ankle, fill with WVO, and simply wait for it to filter through by gravity. Each pair of jeans filters 100 gallons of fuel before finally being thrown away.
Old jeans make an excellent filter.
Make Your Own Biodiesel
Start with microbatches. Don’t make an at-home biodiesel factory right away. For the average person, a single restaurant that gives up 5 gallons of WVO a week is all you’ll need. So far, we’ve found that it takes us about an hour of labor (collecting, filtering, mixing) to give us 10 gallons of biodiesel, at a cost of about $1 per gallon. Here are the basic ratios:
Materials
4 gallons filtered WVO
1⁄2 gallon methanol (methanol can be purchased at auto racing supply stores)
60 grams lye
Instructions
1. Before mixing biodiesel, let WVO heat up by setting the totes in the sun for a few days. During summer months, it will reach the desired temp of 132°F with solar energy. If you cannot reach temperature, it is not the right time of
year to run biodiesel. Wait for warmer weather.
2. Mix methanol and lye in an open, unsealed container. Always add lye to methanol, and not the reverse. Methanol added to lye can cause an explosion. A 1-gallon plastic jug will do. By mixing the two ingredients you create methoxide. Do not cap the container. The chemical reaction caused by combining the two ingredients causes expansion that would burst a sealed container.
3. Swish the methanol–lye mixture (do not stir) until it is well blended. Pour the blend into 4 gallons of warm filtered WVO (we use a 5-gallon plastic tote). Place the tote’s lid on tightly. Shake it vigorously. Then remove the tote’s cap and replace it. This releases any pressure that may have built up. Set the tote out in the sun, with the cap on, for four days.
4. When you return four days later, the mixture will have settled into two layers: a light colored fuel on top and a darker band of glycerin that sits at the bottom. Without shaking, and being careful not to remix the two layers, pour off the top layer into a storage container or directly into the gas tank of a diesel vehicle. While pouring, and as soon as you see that you’ve reached the glycerin layer and it is about to pour out, stop!
5. Dispose of the glycerin. Some people have made faux wood fire logs out of the glycerin byproduct. Its uses are limited, as after being mixed with methoxide, it becomes toxic. To dispose of it, reseal the container and place in the trash.
Safety precaution: When working with methanol and lye, always wear gloves, a mask over your mouth, and protective eyewear. Cover all exposed skin. Should you get lye on your skin, wash it off immediately with vinegar rather than water. Vinegar neutralizes the pH. Always mix methanol and lye outdoors: the fumes are dangerous.
The Good Life Lab Page 19