The Hidden Costs of Solar Power No One Talks About

welcome back to Sprague River homestead I heard you're interested in going solar I tell you what there's some hidden costs for solar that nobody ever talks about today I'm gonna let you in on a little secret of those costs okay so you want to go solar but everybody always talks about the investment the upfront cost and how much it costs to do it very few people actually want to talk about what it costs long-term after the initial investment and what are you gonna do from there so today we're going to talk about all the little pieces of going solar and what happens after you put everything in and how do you maintain it so let's first start by talking about what happens with your panels of course the Sun hits them they convert the sunlight into electrons which goes in to charge your batteries or however you generate the power your panels themselves are gonna need a little bit of maintenance first off for us we have two settings we kind of have a kind of a horizontal here and we don't have a more vertical which dips them very far down this is based on where the Sun is in the sky in a winter or a summer setting so two times a year we have to adjust our panels now while that isn't a investment in money is an investment in time so it takes us approximately 30 minutes twice a year so you can value your time of that if you want to convert to money but you need to adjust your panels if you're not doing some kind of a tracking system to follow the Sun so for us that's a matter of we take each section we either drop it down for a winter setting so it's a little bit more vertical or we need to raise it up in the summer and put it back in the setting so again 30 minutes twice a year to do that the next thing you got to consider with your panels is keeping them cleaned in summer or spring that could mean bird droppings that could mean dirt that can mean pollen all of those things block the Sun from hitting your panels so you'll notice during the summer that you start getting diminished results or diminished charging off your panels just means they're dirty so you might want to wash them you might just spray them off you could wash them with maybe a glass cleaner if you have access to it or however you want to clean it but you got to clean them off that could take upwards of maybe 20-30 minutes every month to every two months and that's a value of time now in the winter when there's snow if snow is on your panels you're not generating power so worst case scenario what we found is that in the winter sometimes we have to come out and clean all of our panels twice a day because it has snowed and they're not making power so we have a nice long handled squeegee come out squeeze you all the panels off getting the snow pulled down on the ground now that is another investment of time other than you need to probably buy your squeegee which may be twenty to thirty bucks depending on what you buy the time sometimes is upwards of twenty to twenty-five minutes to scrape off all the snow if you do that once twice a day that could be thirty to sixty minutes per day over the winter to try and keep your panels clean to charge alright so the next hit and cost for solar maybe how you backup your power now it's not necessarily storage but generation for us we have a diesel generator that is a backup so the days we have no Sun or little Sun or anything else we run a diesel generator as a backup that charges all of our battery banks now we don't have to run this a lot but we have to run it enough that I need to do an oil change on it every season in order to keep it fresh most conventional oils on these little small diesel generators probably run 75 to 100 hours where they need an oil change with a filter typically I run synthetic in arms so I can extend that out a little bit upwards of a hundred hours of run time which for us is equivalent to about one year of service now between the oil and the filter I spin somewhere between fifty to sixty dollars typically and it takes me approximately about 30 to 45 minutes to do all the oil change which is cludes a filter drain the oil put the plug back in add the new oil and then it's good to go coolant you'll probably do kind of depends you can probably get a couple years out of a coolant service with a small radiator just keep an eye on add any coolant or distilled water if you need to there again doing that it doesn't take more than a gallon so you might be in about ten dollars or so to a complete gallon of coolant and if you had to add some distilled water maybe a dollar two dollar fifty per gallon so consider that a little bit investment of course you've got time so maybe let's say an hour total and then for your investment you may need to spend about sixty let's say sixty dollars a year for an oil change and maintenance on your diesel generator so with all of your power generation costs identified now let's talk about storage so for us we run a lead acid battery bank we have 16 batteries all connected together and that gives us a total of approximately 40,000 watts of storage now that's power in order to maintain these every approximately 30 to 45 days I go through and I check the water on these so in that time period I normally use about a gallon to two gallons of distilled water sometimes I go three it depends so let's consider three is our maximum every time and that's every 45 days or a month and a half so probably about seven to eight times a year you're going to use let's say you're going to use 20 gallons of distilled water every year as a worst-case scenario they're about a dollar fifty so you're gonna spend somewhere in the $30.00 range on distilled water beyond keeping those batteries good that time is approximately 30 minutes maybe 45 minutes every time you do that so eight times a year you're gonna spend let's say 30 minutes apiece so you're going to spend four hours a year maintaining your batteries if any of these batteries go bad they are approximately four hundred dollars each and that is going to be a cost depending on what you need now the manufacturer has told us that if you keep your batteries at 80 percent level they expect them to last 10 years so keep good on your batteries let's say every 10 years you may have to replace your total system which is approximately $4,000 maybe a little bit more somewhere in there if one goes bad you may have to replace them you know maybe one a year kind of depends on the luck of the draw a little bit plus it's gonna depend on your ability to keep them watered and maintained all right so now if you really do get 10 years out of your batteries one thing you're going to have to consider is do you go back to doing the lead-acid batteries as a replacement now in 10 years from now or let's say seven because we've been on solar for about three years in seven years from now we may switch to something else I know lithium-ion is really coming on Tesla's got a new home power thing that's about 10,000 watts so you could take four of those replace all your batteries and then you don't really have a lot of maintenance other than doing it the panel's themselves are rated for 30 years and they have a rating of 80% output at 30 years so in the next three decades of doing all of this we can still put out over five thousand watts because we have a five or a six thousand watt system now that's probably gonna work for us it's still good the reason we have such a big system is typically the worst case scenario for us is we only make a couple kilowatts a day and we really have to tax our batteries on the winter to be able to do that so there's kind of a hidden cost of solar you're gonna have time involved obviously you'll have a little bit of monetary investment into it on replacement parts and and that's really the things people don't ask about or talk about it's always about how much does it cost to get into it versus how much does it cost to keep going so that's it today for sprager homestead hopefully you guys find this educational on it what it costs to maintain your solar and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Sprague River Homestead

Views: 414,411

Keywords: small, homestead, south, central, Oregon, living, best, sustain, sustainable, life, raise, goats, goat, rabbits, rabbit, heritage, birds, follow, divulge, secret, secrets, off-grid, offgrid, solar, power, greenhouse, garden, gardening, livestock, livestock guard dogs, solar power, battery power, battery bank maintenance, klamath county, sprgue river homestead, sprague river oregon, nikki manley, canaan manley, how to start a garden, diesel generator maintenance, diesel generator backup

Id: -km13gR2kJo

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 04 2018