I’ve recently been on a mission to rearrange my home cooking and energy utilisation around days of concentrated sunlight, so as to maximise the utilisation of free and available energy from our solar panels and minimise our energy expense. To date, every time that this has happened has been on a Saturday.
This is massively lucky. Saturday is my one real day off. I’ve been planning my menu ahead but it is frustrating when you look ahead and all your available cooking days have cloudy or rainy weather. On this occasion, we had a disappointing forecast of rain for the whole week, but it somehow managed to reverse, giving an impromptu day of sunshine.
Basically what this means is that I batch all my cooking into one sunny day, and simply have some form of energy consuming appliance running from morning until sundown. I bag leftovers from meals and freeze them for microwaving later, for use during cloudy periods where there’s not much free energy going.
I did the sums and realised that this process would save me between $500-$600 per annum, removing from the grid a drain of around 2200 kWh of power annually. That’s about a whole month of winter power.
It also has the effect of improving the return on investment of my 1.5 kW solar power system, without the need for battery storage. I’ve been fairly disappointed with the actual performance of my panels, which have once all the real world adjustments have been made, resulted in an annual ROI of between 4 and 5% (not amazing on a system that gradually degrades over time and may only have a 30 year lifespan). This change of use has the effect of pushing ROI up as high as 15%. Now all of a sudden solar panels can be worthwhile.
Not to mention the effect of retail energy price inflation. My sums have this at 3.11% annually, but during periods of peak inflation such as currently, it could be much higher.
The carbon emissions saving is much of a muchness, but given our reported current reliance on coal burning, it could be considerable.
Basically just really excited at my little innovation and wanted to share my nerd little achievement with the world.
