Saving money by installing electricity myself.

[Varn]

After 3 years of basically camping out at home. We decided to have rural electricity installed. We have power in our business and at a secondary residence but at home we have relied on minimal photo voltaic and Coleman generator. We heat with wood. We bought it from Amish who don't use grid power. I am in my 60's my wife is a bit younger.

At this point I have about 1200 dollars invested in components and have spent 2700 with the power company. We are going to get 60 dollars a month back from the power company until we get our 27oo back.

Yesterday and the day before we dug a deep trench about 60 feet long so that we could put our service wire out to where the pole is going to be set. That was a real shoulder breaker. We set our 4 gauge aluminum wire in conduit in the trench and was tortured at trying to get to turn two right angle turns and get it hooked up. I have installed 10 breakers and still have much of my 1000 feet of 12 gauge wire. My shop isn't wired yet, just have the load center installed.

Today I went out with a small 12 volt battery and tested my circuits, hardly a comprehensive evaluation but everything worked as planned.

We are still keeping our wood heat as primary but will supplement with resistance heating.

There is a photo of our home if you look at my vehicle log for "OD".

[Cobb]

Good luck.

Typically HUD will test homes using a generator to make sure the electrical is ok.

[Varn]

Yeah they are great people to deal with.

They sell wire at wholesale. Was in their store/warehouse and the manager asked, do you want some free 2" conduit, It was used but it is plastic pipe. "yeah sure" Ever gotten any thing free from a power company?

Hoping for the juice either Thursday or Friday.

[Varn]

Yeah Friday afternoon the power company came by and dropped in a pole. Took about 2 hours.

Flipped the switch and turned on the AC.

Our cost to the power company was 2700 dollars of which they will reimburse us 60 dollars a month until spent. We have put in another 2000 dollars in wire, conduit, outlets, load centers and such. Felt good to turn off the generator for the last time. Our solar system is being moved out to an out building for now.

We heat with wood but it will be nice to have some resistance heat in the middle of the winter nights.

[MGB=MPG]

they sell big window units that are heat pumps , cool in summer and heat in winter , they do cost more.

[roosterk0031]

+1 heat pumps 2.5-3x cheaper to operate than resistance heaters, 20x+ more expensive though.

[user removed]

Dig down an put in a geothermal system. Ground water is about 62 degrees after you get down below a few feet. Resistance heating with electricity can get expensive. A thermosyphon passive solar system would be another option for heat in winter if you get plenty of sunshine.

regards
Mech

[Varn]

Thanks for the responses. The numbers don't add up for us. Our forest provide all the basic heat that we need.

We have used wood heat from the beginning. We chain downed hardwoods and split them with a maul.That way we are kept warm twice, once while splitting and moving the wood and then when it is burned.

Adding electric heat means that we won't get "have" to get up to stoke the fire every two hours at night.I am thinking of using 750 1500 watts for 8 hours per day max in the deep of winter. Maybe 40-80 dollars a month for 4 months a year, about the same as our internet.

What we might do is upgrade our wood furnace to a longer lasting fire with less heat loss through the chimney.

If the heat was being primarily being provided for by electricity perhaps the geothermal($10-15k outlay)or other type of heat pump might make sense. At this point there is no foreseeable payback using complex heating systems. If the grid goes down we will go back to using wood heat It would mean chopping wood with an ax for the next season but we would hope it isn't going to come to that.

[minimac]

Since you're heating with wood, it would be an easy task to incorporate a hydronic system for more even heating at a low cost. Use your wood burner to heat a few gallons of water in a tank. Install some fin tube radiation units in the house and a single small, switched circ pump to force flow. Plenty of heat when needed and even natural convection will help to limit the time that the circ pump would need to run. A heat sink,or a pressure relief valve, or bypass piping would need to be incorporated for safety, but should provide you with plenty of heat at very low additional cost.

[Varn]

Glad that the water exchanger works for you. I would rather not have the construction and maintenance costs associated with a more complex system.

We have all the wood we want, our forest makes more than we can burn every year, so fuel cost is zero whether we burn 3 chords or 10. Except for perhaps a half gallon of pre-mix per chord. Making the heat last through the night is our problem.

We chose to put in a new high efficiency EPA wood stove. Haven't had that cold of weather yet but it seems like it will last through the night better. The stove pipe doesn't run nearly as hot as it did with our older stove. The heat is let into the room rather than going up the stack like it did with our old stove.

We were stoking the older cast iron stove about every 2 hours the last few years. Adding another heat exchanger would not be a good idea with this new stove, cooling the exhaust would make it lose draft.

If I can get to the point of retirement or start working from home, my fuel usage will drop dramatically. I won't leave my property more than once per week My cars will last nearly indefinitely.