Hi from south OC in Southern California

[TheLoneAquarist]

Looking to build a hybrid system for my reef aquariums — want to lessen consumption on grid but more importantly to have a good backup for life support systems when we have power outages ( brown outs , rolling, etc.)

hope to learn a lot here.
Cheers
Isaac

 

[Supervstech]

Be sure to measure the usage for it.
Constant loads like that tend to consume massive KWh

 

[TheLoneAquarist]

What is the best way to measure the power consumption? I’m thinking of looking at all the components and adding up their listed power consumption specs…or is just using a Kill-a-watt tool a better “real-world” measurement?

 

[curiouscarbon]

What is the best way to measure the power consumption? I’m thinking of looking at all the components and adding up their listed power consumption specs…or is just using a Kill-a-watt tool a better “real-world” measurement?

put a kill-a-watt between your life support devices and the wall, start a stopwatch on your phone. come back after a day or two and tell us how long the stopwatch app says and how many kWh the kill-a-watt reads

this will greatly help converge upon appropriately sized components to keep your fishos happy and healthy ?

P.S. welcome to the forum, the sky nuclear reactor shines upon us all.

 

[TheLoneAquarist]

So my 24 hour reading running my entire reef is 6.055 kWh.

 

[curiouscarbon]

Thank you for the update!

 

[TheLoneAquarist]

So I did a kill a watt reading and of my my reef display. I used my April SCE bill to figure out my current real-world usage cost for the reef aquarium running with all components. hmmmm….

 

[TheLoneAquarist]

It’s probably a bit cheaper because we’re tiered here. So Generation and Delivery charges differ based on total usage and time of day. But it was easier just using the largest numbers and knowing this is the highest cost for my household currently.