Energy Conservation Project--Our New Water Wheel

We currently have a water wheel that we made ourselves that charges some batteries. When we moved full time into the cabin, we realized that we needed to supplement our water wheel with a generator or two to provide enough charge for everything we needed.  With fuel at $4.00 a gallon or grid tied electricity at $.52 a Kilowatt Hour(kWh) and $6000 worth of utility poles, we're hoping to take advantage of the raging creek in front of the house more efficiently than the home brew water wheel we have now (see picture at left). So we ordered a new system: waterwheel, inverter, controller, meters, batteries, 300 feet of 3"pipe, etc.  I have lots of questions about this new set up and alas everything has arrived and been installed but the new wheel.  

Step 1-Ask a Question

For this project I want to take an inventory of our household electrical appliances and their associated watts and KWh.   My question is: How many and which appliances will we be able to use at a time with our new microhydro system's 6000 watt inverter?

Step 2-Google

As we have been into this project for a few years now, we already have some favorite sites, OtherPower.com, HomePower.com, Energystar.gov,  aceee.org,  need.org.  But a project I did with the school district kept running through my head.  The superintendent challenged the students to reduce the schools' electrical bill.  My job was to go around to the schools and teach the students about Underwriter's Laboratory and how to read the electric nameplate on every electrical appliance in the US, or at least in their school.  

With this information, the students were able to identify the power hogs at their school and the phantom loads (the energy appliances use even when turned off).  For every dollar of savings on the electrical bill the superintendent gave the money back to the students to spend how their classroom decided.  It took a little Googling, but page 28 on this site gave me the idea for the lesson plans about a year ago.  I have adapted that lesson to work for this exercise at our home.

Step 3-Determine data needed to answer question

I need to figure the wattage and time used for every electrical appliance in my house.  From this, figuring the KWh is easy enough to see how much savings we are getting from using our own system.  I also need to figure out which appliances have phantom loads or wall warts and figure this into the 6000 watt ceiling.

Step 4-Determine methodology for collecting data

Using the Underwriters Laboratory electric nameplates, I can find each appliance's amp and volts or it's watts.  Some formulas I will use in the spreadsheet will be:

Amps x Volts = Watts.  

Watts / 1000W/kW = kW   (kilowatts)

kW x hours used=kWh  (kilowatt hours)

I will also have to determine roughly how much phantom charge, if any, is being used by the appliance (Lawrence Berkeley Lab has a good list). Then I will figure the amount of time we use the appliance each year. The result will be kWh per appliance.   This will give me a figure of kWh to compare to our old electric bill (@ $300/month).  But more importantly it will give us a way to prioritize the appliances that can be used at one time given the 6000 watt inverter ceiling. I hope to figure out which appliance we can get rid of or which ones need to be replaced with more energy efficient ones.

Anthropological Assessment of Thorne Bay School's Technology

Over the last month and a half I have been swamped by the technology culture at our school. In order to complete this assignment I actually got it done early in the semester anticipating a flood of work into the quarter.  So as the the deadline approached, I went to figure out the Google docs and prepared to post my anthropological observations.  I observed that I had no idea where or how I saved them.  Since that unfortunate experience I have completely familiarized myself with the searching capabilities on my computer.  

In an attempt to make my VTC Biology class more user friendly, I have the students on accounts with several websites that go along with their textbooks.  I developed my own website for the class and got it published to our server. At the same time I crashed the school's calendar system because I added too many attachments. I have been working with the tech department to get applications installed on my computer in order to take advantage of some of the online Biology programs.  The grading for the quarter was challenging as I was just given an account with the online gradebook.  The database for entering grades through our school was also a challenge as I hadn't been put into the database.  During a routine screen sharing to monitor students I observed some violations of their user agreements for their computers.  That turned into a huge issue that took up a lot of my time, but also brought attention to the rest of the students that they are responsible for the material on their computers.  My students have developed podcasts, started their own blogs, do PowerPoints routinely, and are constantly.  

So as the time rolled on and the due date was maonths behind I have delved deeply into my schools technology culture.  So now that I have revisited the technology culture of my school I really didn't have to do any research I relied completely on participant observation, I had been through the trenches and here it is, the document on Google that is also saved in several locations on my computer, a thumb drive and also an external hard drive.