Quote:
Originally Posted by dablack
Yep JRM. You called it.
Most engineers (I'm mechanical too) aproach things from a ROI point of view.
If an extra $1000 will save me $100 a year, I will do it. If it will only save me $10, I won't. I'm not sure how to make decisions any other way.
Austin
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Dablack,
I'm not sure. For me there are a lot of, let's say, hidden variables. Tomorrow the grid goes down, which is entirely possible in this country, and we don't know when it will be back up. Now the ROI goes out the window. Then there's funding people who want to kill us, I'm not especially keen on that. I think there's also the satisfaction factor of seeing meters spin backwards.
Also here's something I never expected, before I got my free intertie I had a strictly off grid backup system in. Well, a couple of years ago Outback modified (for free) my off grid inverters to offgrid/intertie. Now I have the best of both worlds and I'm selling 50 to 60 KWHs back to the grid during the summer. In fact I'm so far ahead I'm using electric heat in some of the winter months. And if the grid goes down I have backup, in fact, so much that a year or so ago we had severe flooding and lost power for a week. I loaned my genset out because I didn't need it!
Sure, when I design a circuit I use ohms law and Fast Fourier Transforms but sometime intuition and gut feelings work really well too!
Rob