Living Off the Grid Comfortably | Future House | Ask This Old House

as recently as 150 years ago practically every house in America was off the grid this is how you got your water this was your sewer where's your lighting and heating cover from you're looking at modern houses like these are connected to a variety of systems there are pipes that carry gas in water into the house and there's also a pipe that carries waste out of the house to the sewer line here in the street and these houses are wired to the local electric company to the cable provider and to the phone company the new technology allows the room off the grid in an efficient way and still have all the comforts of a modern home well I'm headed to South Carolina to find out good morning Ross good morning Ralph welcome to our home in Pickens South Carolina what a beautiful place what a beautiful house thank you when I think of off-the-grid houses though I'm not thinking of this I mean this is grand this is luxurious how many square feet there's 6,800 square feet Wow this house was built 15 years ago this house has always been off the grid as far as water and sewer but now when my wife and I have decided to take it completely off the grid now I've been in the air-conditioning business for 50 years there's technologies available commercially that will allow us to do that gotcha so you're taking commercial technologies applying it to a residential house this is not off the grid yet you guys are trends we're transitioning we're about half way through right now got it well I'd love to see the technology can we check it out I would love for you to see it all right let's go so how is Ralph moving the 6,800 square foot house completely off the grid for starters he's getting his electricity from renewable sources when it's completed this solar array will have 144 photovoltaic panels to provide 40 kilowatts of power a wind turbine will generate electricity at night or on cloudy days a battery bank will store unused power for lighting and appliances but the solar array also powers these chillers which as a system are more efficient to run than a conventional air-conditioning unit I think of the insanity of how that equipment operates okay it takes heat from your house and then exhausts it outside okay and and and it's wasted what we were able to do is to capture that heat we pull the heat from the house and we put it into a tank for hot water make it available for the household hot water for the swimming pool for whatever you'd like to have and also in the winter we're able to pull heat out of the air even as low as 20 below zero and move it into the structure or into a storage tank and then the magic of this I assume is that you're not making heat you're moving eat we're moving heat and what do you store that in well we have some tanks I'd like to show you all right know that Ross this is where the hot and cold glycol come up okay these tanks are actually buried about four feet in the ground and I've got one open over here for you to take a look at okay okay what's inside these tanks is is hundreds of feet of poly tubing or pecs okay this tank is normally filled with water and we use it to store heat we'll bring the excess heat or any heat that's produced with the P V through the chiller or bring it in here and we'll store a tank of hot water so essentially what we have here is a thermal battery rather than a battery that stores electrons we have a battery that's storing BTUs and what our gonna use that hot water for for how for comfort heating okay for our household hot water or whatever anything you want to use the hot water for got it got it but you're also doing this with the Colton right that's correct what we do with the cold tank is the cold glycol comes in goes through the tubes and we'll make a 500 pound block I really inside that's right we'll use that tank at night for to keep the house cool so even when the sun's not shining you're not running your equipment you're a chiller it's completely I'll have a block of ice to pull all that cooling energy from absolutely wow that's fascinating stuff well Ralph I love you the fact that you're going off grid one of things that's surprising to me is that the technology you're using here today is actually old technology it's been used for 30 years in commercial buildings so why is it been a slow adoption for residential use well commercial and residential has always been billed differently okay commercial rates are rates that have peak and time-of-use components okay there are times of day work businesses or commercial applications pay more for their power than they do at others and it could affect their their power structure for the whole month mm-hmm and so what commercial has been done for a long long time as they've used ice storage they make ice at night and then during the day during the peak demand hours they'll melt the ice to keep the building's cold rather than run the compressors got it so you're saying because they're storing this ice during off-peak hours when they're not paying as much for electricity they can actually use that ice storage to then recall the building during the next day when they don't have to run the chillers or the compressors that's correct these same time of use charges these peak charges are coming to residential applications got it and the really cool benefit of this is that because you're being able to store energy you actually can offset how much how many more power plants go up and the peak charge on the grid yes you can avoid building any new power plants should go to distribute what's called distributed energy yep okay and you put photovoltaic out or fuel cells all over okay and you avoid any new power plants you work with what you've got because what we've got is plenty to go forward if it's used wisely awesome awesome well thank you Ralph for the tour I love you thank you so much thank you right Wow the future is bright 6,800 square feet a pool a farm that is seriously over the top there's a lot going on there that's true but you think about the traditional house in America that has cooling right you have an outdoor unit a condenser and you have an indoor unit right and you have a set of refrigeration lines between the two right that's cooling the house you're actually moving heat from inside to outside rejecting it to the the different tears that we're using the chiller yeah so what exactly is the difference between a chiller and an air-conditioner yeah so the chiller is gonna heat and cool water right or glycol so instead of refrigeration lines moving between the house and the outside unit we have water lines and so I can create a hot tank I can create a cold tank so that I can do simultaneous heating and cooling I can store it you know for later use and you get the storage because of the liquid in other words he had a tank that was ice you can only have that with a liquid that's how he's storing cold that's right he's got another tank where he heats the water that's storing the heat the key point is the water I can store that energy and I can use at a later point in time all right okay and water is the ultimate transfer medium nothing's nothing's better you know this this thing ties into the dream that I've had for a long time in this country the big house of the pool no actually a scalable and really usable BTU battery you know not a breeze gonna have that kind of land where you can bury tanks outside so the idea is to have a super insulated tank that would have handles on it you could get it in through a building through a doorway it would have a heat exchanger coil inside it yeah and it would be modular you could tie them together tie them together like you would batteries and then all of a sudden that when you're making heat you can just store it and then all of a sudden once you've stored energy in this tank or these series of tanks you can come out of it and go out to make hot water to fill your faucets heat the building with a little bit of radiant and stuff like that and it's really the future we got to find a way to keep moving heat not trying to Mickey alright well I mean it is cool to see this future to think that something like that could be possible all right well good story thank you for bringing it to us you

Channel: This Old House

Views: 550,273

Rating: 4.8709512 out of 5

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Episode, TV Show, future house, lawn, toilet, home technology, Ross Trethewey, HVAC, equipment, this old house episode, all new this old house episode, this old house all new, new episode, renovating house, house renovation, how to renovate a house, living off the grid, off the grid, living off the grid comfortably

Id: N3Em64OBGqI

Length: 7min 51sec (471 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 29 2017