Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I like the foe button - reading a thread is just so much easier without total crap
being discussed

behave outback.........

Back to the Mercury issue, remember that normal fluorescent tubes also have mercury in them (a fair bit more than the CFLs also I believe) and have been around for more than most of us have been. I recall a house we lived in, built in 1946, which had fluoro recesses in the moulded plaster ceiling.

These should also be treated in the same way as CFLs are in terms of disposal and the clean-up of broken tubes.

Regards,
Tony

Average 12KW a day.
Family of five, three kids who dont know what an 'off' switch is.
I thought we would be higher. We could reduce quite easy with a little effort

Nowhere near green.. 2400-3000kwh a month...

Thats a huge amount of power, by my reckoning you have about 4000w running constantly 24/7. How do you manage to use so much?

3200 KWh per month, 194 gallons of water per month. Wife and kids are out of town, curious to see how that affects July's numbers!

Also I commute 150 miles to work every day. Fill up my car's 10 gallon tank every other day. Bummed that you can't get conventional gas engines that get much over 35MPG, why not? Hoping for plug-in hybrids. Why do I live so far out? Ask Alan Greenspan...

Systems:
Two adults, four dairy goats, 26 chickens, 3 turkeys, feeder pig, 150 gal tank/220gal GB, 500 gal pond/150 gal GB 300 sw. ft. raised bed garden & 9 fruit trees. 1100 sq ft house 360 ft deep well & several barns and outbuildings. 360 sq.ft greenhouse. 3500 watts PV 800 watts wind power and grid tie inverters set to sell back or buy as required. We do use propane to supplement heat hot water and cook.
We generate an adv. 17 kwh a day and buy as required. In April we bought $.39 worth of power or about 300 watts a day. May was hot and had to run swamp coolers some and had a rate increase, bought &1.11 power or about 500 watts a day. June was hotter yet and ran coolers longer and have not been billed yet but used about 700 watts a day or 220 kwh for the month. Our basic add on charges for meter and taxes amount about $12.00 a month. We use about 10 gal of propane a month. In winter we heat with solar, biodiesel. and am adding a woodstove. We burn about 130 gal of BD per winter for heat. The green house will have a small oil stove for extreme cold temps.
I run a large air pump for the existing AP system and the isolation tank with allowance for the unfinished FT. I pipe air next door to scrub the cooked biodiesel and/or dry it after washing. The AP pumps are small and run continuosely drawing 60 watts to 120 watts each. Will run two more for solar heating this winter. In the pond I run a small fountain pump as well.
I have to run the 24 volt 1/2 hp well pump 6-8 hours every other day for irrigation. It is a pump jack and only puts out 4 gal a min. The 24 volt pressure pump draws 8 amps and runs about 1.5 hours a day. We water the raised beds from the pond and make up with a float valve.
All this keeps us busy full time. To go totally off grid would require more of an investment and work than seems worth it. We have seen power rates more than double since the pv was installed. Saving conservatively $150 a month has paid back 1/2 of the cost. In another 8 years it will have paid for itself. The fringe benifits are not having to haul water and being able to do heating/cooling, gardens, animals and AP without worry about power failure or future rates.

My bad, 3200 KWh is in February, low is about 1700 KWh in October and May. That's between 106 and 56 KWh per diem.

My toyota yaris gets 43 MPG on the highway. If i added an electrolyzer and adjustments to the computer to the car to assist combustion I could get much better millage; which I will do when I get enough money to build it.

Hatchback or sedan?

4 door Sedan. Of course I broke the car in correctly by going from 0 to 70 as fast as I could every single time I had to stop for the first 900 miles. The pressure wears the rings for a better fit. I read about it in an article where a guy had a stack of pistons showing the slow vs hard break in. Read about it here http://www.mototuneusa.com/break_in_secrets.htm

Cool info, maybe that is why my car has always used oil...