09-19-2006, 10:33 AM
I adore Helco, their ticker symbol is HE and they pay great dividends and have been doing it for the past seventy years! Of course, our house runs on sunshine so we don't have to pay them, they pay us.
We have four photovoltaic solar panels feeding a 1,500 watt inverter and a battery bank of twelve batteries. Those are five years old and still working fine. However, it will cost about $600 to replace them in a year or two. There is a power pole 50 feet from our house, but since we didn't have a building permit - our house was built in 1911 before the building department existed so Helco wouldn't attach us to power until we had one. At the time it was easier to go solar, since then we've found out that we could have gotten power anyway since our house is grandfathered and doesn't need a building permit. Anything built before 1915 which has documentation prior to 1930 doesn't require a permit. I'm sure there aren't many buildings which can fit in that category, but this one does so had we known that at the time, we could have gotten attached to the grid. It is nice to not have any electric bills and kinda fun to turn all the lights on when the grid goes down.
The refrigerator is electric, the aquarium pump is always on, the lights are all flourescent (I'm waiting to get the new LED lights which use a fraction of the power necessary for flourescent lights), the TV is huge and there's several computers as well as a plotter. The washing machine and miscellaneous power tools - grinders, saws, drill press, etc. are all electric too. We can run the electric popcorn popper if everything else is off since that pulls 1,450 watts. (Unless we start the generator, then we have many more watts.) The stove and instantaneous water heater are propane, although we have some solar water heating panels which we will install at some time. We have the "iron sun" (gas generator) for when we either want to run too many power tools or have had too much shade. That will be run several hours a month in the summer and several hours a week in winter. Eventually, we will add a few more photovoltaic panels and then hopefully we won't need to run the generator at all.
The whole system was $4,600 for parts only. There are the four panels, the inverter and a charge controller. The wires to connect the batteries together are welding cables with soldered on ends (cheaper to build our own cables than to buy them - especially when we needed a dozen of them) and the rest of the electrical system for the house is just regular 120 volt stuff.
It has been about five years since it was installed and the system has probably just about paid for itself now. We still have a few expenses for propane and gas for the generator so we wouldn't be saving the full $125 each month that we had been paying for electric at our last house. If we have been saving $75 each month for the past five years, then the system has be paid for by now.
We have four photovoltaic solar panels feeding a 1,500 watt inverter and a battery bank of twelve batteries. Those are five years old and still working fine. However, it will cost about $600 to replace them in a year or two. There is a power pole 50 feet from our house, but since we didn't have a building permit - our house was built in 1911 before the building department existed so Helco wouldn't attach us to power until we had one. At the time it was easier to go solar, since then we've found out that we could have gotten power anyway since our house is grandfathered and doesn't need a building permit. Anything built before 1915 which has documentation prior to 1930 doesn't require a permit. I'm sure there aren't many buildings which can fit in that category, but this one does so had we known that at the time, we could have gotten attached to the grid. It is nice to not have any electric bills and kinda fun to turn all the lights on when the grid goes down.
The refrigerator is electric, the aquarium pump is always on, the lights are all flourescent (I'm waiting to get the new LED lights which use a fraction of the power necessary for flourescent lights), the TV is huge and there's several computers as well as a plotter. The washing machine and miscellaneous power tools - grinders, saws, drill press, etc. are all electric too. We can run the electric popcorn popper if everything else is off since that pulls 1,450 watts. (Unless we start the generator, then we have many more watts.) The stove and instantaneous water heater are propane, although we have some solar water heating panels which we will install at some time. We have the "iron sun" (gas generator) for when we either want to run too many power tools or have had too much shade. That will be run several hours a month in the summer and several hours a week in winter. Eventually, we will add a few more photovoltaic panels and then hopefully we won't need to run the generator at all.
The whole system was $4,600 for parts only. There are the four panels, the inverter and a charge controller. The wires to connect the batteries together are welding cables with soldered on ends (cheaper to build our own cables than to buy them - especially when we needed a dozen of them) and the rest of the electrical system for the house is just regular 120 volt stuff.
It has been about five years since it was installed and the system has probably just about paid for itself now. We still have a few expenses for propane and gas for the generator so we wouldn't be saving the full $125 each month that we had been paying for electric at our last house. If we have been saving $75 each month for the past five years, then the system has be paid for by now.
Kurt Wilson