Designing your own electricity system - part 3 (measuring success)

Here is my first thinking point.

What is more expensive?

1) Buying a new car for R150,000 or spending the same amount of money to take part of your house off the grid?

2) Spending R20,000 on the annual family holiday or the same amount taking your TV room off the grid? (note that this R20,000 makes some assumptions - we will look into this when we get to design).

How should we redefine "success" in the "green age"?

Should we continue to measure success as the Rolex watch or the fancy car or should we change our measurement to "successful people live off the grid"?

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Designing your own electricity system - part 7 (fridges)

Here are some specifications regarding energy saving fridges. Tafelberg sell some of the Ardo range of fridges. The Ardo rating is: 130KWH rating per year. Even if it really uses 165KWH per year, that will be amazing as an A++ energy star fridge is rated at 380KWH per year and a normal fridge much higher than that. My normal fridge (which I still need to replace) uses approximately 660 kwh per year which at 70 cents per kwh (my rate) is about R40 per month. Note that this is only based on one day's usage. After a few months, I will have a more accurate number. The Ardo fridge uses about 40Watts when it is on and is so quiet that a friend on mind has it in his passage outside two of the bedrooms. At 165kwh per year , the Ardo fridge costs R10 per month. A normal fridge is about R2000 and an Ardo fridge is about R8000. The difference is R6000, so R6000 / R30 (saving) = 200 months = 17 years. Not a very good payback period, but remember what I said in an earlier part of this blog s

Sri Lanka Day 1

My brother, Antony, walking around Sri Lanka. Please support him. Look at his web site https://2birds.co.za/

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