Ive had solar for a year and now the utility company charges a demand fee... not cool.

Zwy said:

Around here where winter gets way below 0°F, it might be wise to use the air source with some type of auxiliary such as wood or gas. This is where ground source holds the advantage but if the cold spell lasts 3 weeks, it wouldn't make sense to spend $60K for a 4 ton GSHP. One can buy plenty of gas for that.

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In southern MO we get below ~ -10f for a just a few hours every other year. 99% of the time we are well above that.

I have two mini splits, one for the basement where we couldn't retrofit duct work and one in my shop. I've watched them both put out warm air down to -14f when they shut off for low temp.

OzSolar said:

In southern MO we get below ~ -10f for a just a few hours every other year. 99% of the time we are well above that.

I have two mini splits, one for the basement where we couldn't retrofit duct work and one in my shop. I've watched them both put out warm air down to -14f when they shut off for low temp.

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This winter was mild, we only had sub zero for 2 weeks. Some days the high was below 0°F.

If the sun was shining on those cold days, I'd run the resistance heaters first instead of the heat pump which is supposed to heat to -15°F. The defrost cycle will kill any efficiency and the unit will be negative on COP (below 1). Electric resistance would be a COP of 1.

If batteries were full I'd turn on the heat pump. Might as well gain that heat energy from excess PV. I do all of this remote with my phone. Modern tech can be a great thing.

1201 said:

Sometimes I don't understand us solar people. You've got people asking if an inverter can run their electric dryer, when there is plenty of sun outside for free to dry your clothes with- no inverter or batteries needed. Its like people don't even want to try-even a little- to cut back.
Oh by the way, drying clothes outside-there's 6kw of demand avoided.

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Dude, you're in Texas!

1201 said:

Sometimes I don't understand us solar people. You've got people asking if an inverter can run their electric dryer, when there is plenty of sun outside for free to dry your clothes with- no inverter or batteries needed. Its like people don't even want to try-even a little- to cut back.
Oh by the way, drying clothes outside-there's 6kw of demand avoided.

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Yep we use the outside Laundry line in the Shed for almost 70% of our laundry.
Running a dryer for two loads is about 6-8KWh of wasted solar power.

The bottom line is is these "demand fees" just don't make sense to the average consumer. You have to go through a lot of work to even understand what it means and then a lot more work to figure out what is causing it in your specific case. If they switched to a time of use billing (which was the other option my utility company didn't go with) it is very easy for the average consumer to understand. This really feels more like another fee they can get away with to make more money without any ability for the average consumer to do anything about.

rhino said:

Dude, you're in Texas!

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I am
But I know, for a fact, via YouTube, that Amish people clothesline dry their clothes, in PA,OH,And IN

rhino said:

Dude, you're in Texas!

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Indeed. If I even opened my door at -30F to hang the clothes outside to freeze-dry, it would take a lot of BTU to make up for the heat loss!

rhino said:

The bottom line is is these "demand fees" just don't make sense to the average consumer. You have to go through a lot of work to even understand what it means and then a lot more work to figure out what is causing it in your specific case. If they switched to a time of use billing (which was the other option my utility company didn't go with) it is very easy for the average consumer to understand. This really feels more like another fee they can get away with to make more money without any ability for the average consumer to do anything about.

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You should check out aps in Phoenix. They have usage, time of use, AND demand fees. Also about 12 other fees on the monthly bill.

Hedges said:

I always ignored that stuff about "must be level", but it matters for condensing dryers.

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Bad idea!
If you want to get the most life out of compressors and Motors it is must be close to 100% level.
Any offset causes uneven wear in the motors and it is even more of a problem in compressors because of oil distribution .

rhino said:

The bottom line is is these "demand fees" just don't make sense to the average consumer. You have to go through a lot of work to even understand what it means and then a lot more work to figure out what is causing it in your specific case. If they switched to a time of use billing (which was the other option my utility company didn't go with) it is very easy for the average consumer to understand. This really feels more like another fee they can get away with to make more money without any ability for the average consumer to do anything about.

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Personally, I think demand fees might be easier to understand for most people. One of my local utilities offer residential 3 TOU plans that are very similar to other and mind numbingly confusing when you try to dig into them.

Regardless, the deck is increasingly stacked against the consumers more and more every day.

Took a look at my January Bill to see what all the fees are. Since I use online Billing I don't always review it, seems fairly straightforward for now Though the Energy/RTO adjustment credit I am not sure what it is.

ksmithaz1 said:

If you have easy access to a reasonable volume of good groundwater at multiple depths it can work

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Year 21 of pump and dump. Paid $2800 for FHP (now Bosch) no nonsense single stage system with cupronickel coil and desuperheater minus $600 utility rebate. Used existing home well and discharge to riverbottom - i do have an inexhaustible supply of sand filtered water at 20ft depth, back property line is the river 1/2 mile away. Figure $500 for DIY materials to install.

No problems ever. I did kill one Grundfos SQE pump, one PSC blower motor, and I delime minimum every other year with 5 gallon bucket of vinegar, and circulatory pump. Indeed, open loop CAN work.

OzSolar said:

Regardless, the deck is increasingly stacked against the consumers more and more every day.

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This was prophesied in the good book - death spiral of the legacy grid

The important pieces of information to know for peak shaving are:

1. what is the size of the peaks
2. what is the duration of the peaks
3. what is the frequency (how many months would you see these peaks)
4. what are the components that make up the peaks

So if the peaks are large like 15 KW
If they last a long time say 10 hours in a day mainly at night

You will need 150 KWHs or $45,000 of batteries to fill that usage gap. That will be very expensive to fill with batteries/inverters. If you plan for 10 hours and the gap turn out to be 10:15 you will not gain anything, because your battery gave out before the peak ended. You will be charged anyway.


Gas Fire Place

This would reduce the need to run your resistive heat.

Just a thought, but since you are saying this issues is relatively infrequent when you have extremely cold weather, you might consider a gas fireplace. These are available in a variety of BTU outputs and efficiencies. It has the added benefit of giving you some emergency heating when the grid is down. Note that some of the newer systems use fully electronic control systems. Older systems worked like old water heaters where the required electricity was supplied by a thermocouple. So it may actually require batteries to turn it on when your power is down.

So, for about $7000.00 one of these could be installed in your house. If you don't have propane or gas and you don't want to get it installed, (it sounds like you are all electric) this is not an option. It is rather ironic that the hardest houses to take "Off Grid" are actually the all electric houses. Their electric power requirements are huge compared with houses that use some natural gas. My house has a natural gas furnace, water heater, and stove. It does have an electric dryer and wall oven, but usage of those can be managed. Would I cook a turkey when the grid is down and there is no sun? Probably not.

Before I had a full home back up, my plan was to use my gas fire place if the grid went down. Would it have heated my home as evenly as my furnace? No. Would it keep me reasonably comfortable and prevent the pipes from freezing in an emergency? Certainly.

One thing I am not sure about is this. Is this demand charge per month for your peak electricity for the whole year, or is it by the month in which the peak occurs? If this saves you 70 a month, it will take 8 years to pay back the cost. If the charge only applies to say the two coldest months where the resistance heat is being used, the pay back is 50 years.


Load Management

Rather than supporting peak usage through batteries and inverters, this would reduce the actual amount of energy being used at one time. For example if you want your house heater to have priority over your clothes dryer and water heater, you could program this into your device. Your water heater could run when the heater was not running. Maybe you make the range a higher priority than your heater. You can still cook, because the device will turn off the heater until you are done cooking.

This solution by Sol Arc seems like it would be a potentially great solution to your problem. The only issue is that they have been saying this is "coming soon" for 1.5 years. Apparently they are having challenges getting this out the door. I am just guessing, but my understanding is that for a 240 volt circuit it requires that two relays be paralleled together. Now when using 240 volts in a normal panel you need to provide a mechanical interlock to insure that BOTH hot leads are disconnected when you switch the breaker off.

The device has 14 circuits, so it can manage 14*120 volt circuits or 7*240 volt circuits by paralleling 2 circuits together. Now the problem would be that if this device was not configured correctly or there was some kind of a glitch, it could lead to only one leg of the 240 volt circuit being disconnected.


Backup Generator

Many commercial properties have "Load Shedding" agreements with the power company. If you could use a back up generator during days with extreme cold you would avoid the extra charge. I'm not sure this on makes sense unless a generator is already part of your plans as you will need a large one to support these loads.

Throwing expensive inverters and batteries at the problem may not be the best way to solve it.

1201 said:

You should check out aps in Phoenix. They have usage, time of use, AND demand fees. Also about 12 other fees on the monthly bill.

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Power here is relatively inexpensive. They have different plans, but both SRP and APS require demand billing ($30 mon) if you grid-tie your solar. If not you can just do TOU or straight line billing. They have other oddball plans as well.

'It is rather ironic that the hardest houses to take "Off Grid" are actually the all electric houses. Their electric power requirements are huge compared with houses that use some natural gas.'

Indeed but if you are using NG you are only off the Electrical grid, not the Utility grid. So if you want to be "Off Grid" you need to be running more solar or a wood stove or something not piped in. If you truly want to be "Off-Grid", as in not dependent on a 3rd party utility, all electric with some wood stove emergency backup is going to be somewhat simpler, but you will have to build it out for demand which is going to be pricey.

ksmithaz1 said:

Power here is relatively inexpensive. They have different plans, but both SRP and APS require demand billing ($30 mon) if you grid-tie your solar. If not you can just do TOU or straight line billing. They have other oddball plans as well.

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oh ok. my friend who has solar in phoenix showed me a bill and it had tou, demand and usage. Ive never seen so many line items on a bill

1201 said:

oh ok. my friend who has solar in phoenix showed me a bill and it had tou, demand and usage. Ive never seen so many line items on a bill

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A few ironies that I think are worth mentioning:

REC (Rural electric COOP's) are member owned and take every chance they get to proudly declare that are very member centric, but this continued behavior clearly demonstrates that they want to do anything but what's best for their members.

IOU (Investor Owner Utilities) are publicly regulated. In general, that means that they are tasked with delivering the lowest cost energy to its customers and in exchange for that they are guaranteed a profit. I think that if regulators did their job, I think the utilities would have a hard time have proving that these rates structures and added result in the lowest cost energy.

At what point does 20/20 etc. get involved in this? Seems like a great story to me.

ksmithaz1 said:

Indeed but if you are using NG you are only off the Electrical grid, not the Utility grid. So if you want to be "Off Grid" you need to be running more solar or a wood stove or something not piped in. If you truly want to be "Off-Grid", as in not dependent on a 3rd party utility, all electric with some wood stove emergency backup is going to be somewhat simpler, but you will have to build it out for demand which is going to be pricey.

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I guess I am one of those people that wants to plan for the most common outages, and not necessarily every possible scenario. My system is best described as grid tied with some emergency backup capability. Having enough backup electricity to run without the grid is much more affordable when you have a gas stove, hot water heater, and furnace. Trying to heat a house in -5 degree temperatures with resistive heat coming from batteries, just isn't very cost effective. Solar is actually great for running A/C systems since the demand meets up well with the available power production. Trying to run a heat pump or resistive heat off solar when you are fairly far north and winters tend to have long periods of clouds just doesn't work very well. You get the least power when your demand is highest.

I think it is safe to say that Natural Gas is more reliable than electricity. Propane is better still. For 2-3 months a year even with not too many huge electric loads, my solar is not going to produce enough power to run everything. I am about 300 KWHs short in Dec, Jan, Feb. I would need to double my array from 12,500 to 25,000 watts to make enough power in those months. At $2.50 a watt this would run $30,000 for that extra $150.00 of electricity I need in the winter. If the grid is down for a long time, I would need some supplemental power from a generator. Even most fully off grid homes have generators available for times when solar production is low. I have full 1 to 1 net metering here and the credits roll over from one month to the next. So my winter electricity is paid for by my summer over production. Over the course of a year when the grid is working my system over produces, so I actually get cash back once a year in June when they do their "True up". Adding more hardware doesn't make sense for me.

The thing is with the scenario outlined here, there is a very good chance that no matter how many solar panels and batteries you threw at this problem, at some point they would be exhausted. If the resistance heat turned on for any one 15 minute period, you would end up paying the demand fee anyway. Given this might happen 2-3 times a year, there is no case to be made for trying to solve this problem with solar. The cost of the equipment vs the demand fee makes it totally impractical.

I also don't have a doomsday bunker buried in my back yard.

wheisenburg said:

I also don't have a doomsday bunker buried in my back yard.

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You should work on that. . .

At -5F I think you could handle all-electric with the right HVAC equipment, depends on how much lower than that you need to go. Some of the guys here are probably darn close, to the 1 or 2 days of supplemental power, but indeed, from time to time solar power is just not going to cut it even with an exorbitant expenditure of capital.

I see alot of off grid houses and cabins here in northern michigan. None try to heat with electricity. The simple answer is its too expensive and will still result in disappointment.

The common item EVERY SINGLE OFF GRID HOUSE HAS is wood heat. Woodstove or even outdoor wood boiler. Circulation of air and water is easy to run on solar.

Runner up would be propane or natural gas furnace. Even mentioned above, a freestanding propane fireplace. (I have one, its fantastic)

Sure on paper you can get the numbers to work in your favor but that wont be reality. The only way to heat with electricity is to waste alot of it. The OP's electric bill proves this.

I'm late to the party and I only read the first two pages. I have a demand rate between 4-8PM of $3.00. I have my Sol-Ark 15K set to not utilize any grid power during that time and to use solar and/or batteries during that time. Reading your first post, the demand charge is set to 15 minutes during any 24x7 day for the entire month? Is that correct? Ludicrous in my mind. Totally a money grab from what I see.

If that is indeed the case, getting away from that will be hard. It's bad enough it actually might be cheaper to run on a generator for those days you don't have solar and your batteries are empty. I see an EG4 18K PV or a Sol-Ark 15K in your future.

wheisenburg said:

I have full 1 to 1 net metering here and the credits roll over from one month to the next. So my winter electricity is paid for by my summer over production. Over the course of a year when the grid is working my system over produces, so I actually get cash back once a year in June when they do their "True up".

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You get cash back? That would be the first time I've ever heard of that.

Here in Missouri we get 1 for 1 during the month but any excess is carried forward at wholesale which, as you probably already know, is ~1/5th of retail. On top of that our annual true up is zeroing out any excess at no cash or credit.

What they are trying to move to is no net metering so any excess is immediately credited as wholesale.

A couple of my favorites here in Las Vegas (NV Energy) is...

1. Energy Efficiency Charge, and

2. Expanded Solar Access Program Charge

So I get charged for being efficient and charged to help others that can't afford solar, etc.

Ryushin said:

I'm late to the party and I only read the first two pages. I have a demand rate between 4-8PM of $3.00. I have my Sol-Ark 15K set to not utilize any grid power during that time and to use solar and/or batteries during that time. Reading your first post, the demand charge is set to 15 minutes during any 24x7 day for the entire month? Is that correct? Ludicrous in my mind. Totally a money grab from what I see.

If that is indeed the case, getting away from that will be hard. It's bad enough it actually might be cheaper to run on a generator for those days you don't have solar and your batteries are empty. I see an EG4 18K PV or a Sol-Ark 15K in your future.

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Yes the demand is a 24x7 thing starting in April for me... a money grab is the best way to put it... I would love to have the Sol-ark 15k..