Porqe No Los Dos? (Why Can't we have Both)
I have a tendency to move on to the next thing once I consider the current project is sorted, but sometimes it is good to recognise that there is more than one way to skin a cat (so to speak) and that you should keep you options open. We had a 12 volt solar electricity system in place which powered the lights and the fridge, with batteries so that if there was a power failure some stuff would keep running. Then some 8 to 10 years ago they came out with this idea of a system that generated power and sent it back to the grid, reimbursing you on your power bill for the power you generated. My initial response was “No, we already have solar”.
Our own system?
After some consideration I decided that it did make sense seeing as we still used power from the grid to power parts of the house, why could we only have one system in place? Porque no los dos? So we had a 1Kw back to the grid system installed, which then (on the 60c feed in tariff) paid for most of our electricity for about 6 years. Then of course they changed things and the power company now gives us much less that we have to give them per KwHr of power. (Which is why we are mostly off grid now, but that’s another story).
Or 'back to the grid'
The point is – don’t get hung up on one answer to a problem (such as how do we provide ourselves with power?) Keep looking around, don’t stop thinking about things when there is one fix in place, a better or easier one may come up which you can implement as well. Multiple fixes mean redundancy and that means greater resilience.
