The largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete, can power 1M homes

Re:The largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete, can po... by js2 on Thursday September 26, 2019 @03:50PM (#21084782)

8-9 tons of A/C split across three units. High ceilings. All windows, some of them quite large, are on the east and west side of the house. They are double-paned, but still. We have shutters but they are mostly open because we like the light. I work from home, and we home school our kids, so the house is always occupied.

We don't keep the house exceptionally cool. 78° during the day, 74° on the second floor at night just before bed.

I really need to try and track things down a bit better. I've got two sub-panels and it's a lot of circuits to track it down. I can start by monitoring the obvious things though: A/C units, refrigerators, dryer. I recently replaced two of the A/C units, but around the same time switch from natural gas dryer to electric and that seems to have been a wash.

Power comes from a nuclear plant less than 10 miles away, so at least it's clean? :-(

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Re:The largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete, can po... by js2 on Thursday September 26, 2019 @06:01PM (#21086059)

If I've done my math right on the A/C units, they pull a combined 8500 watts. It would only take them each running on average 15 minutes per hour to eat up 52 kWh per day.

Two 14 SEER units, one 3.5 ton, one 3 ton, and a 10 SEER 2 ton unit.

1 ton = 12,000 BTU.

(6.5 x 12000) / 14 + 2 x 12000 / 10 = 7971 watts.

The air handlers have 1/5 HP motors, call that another 150 watts per air handler, so we're up to 8500 watts at least.

52 kWh / 8.5 kW is a little over 6 hours, or 1/4 of the day.

To use less power and still have a comfortable home, I'd have to insulate it better and switch to smaller and more efficient A/C units. The units are sized properly according to:

https://asm-air.com/airconditioning/what-size-central-air-co...

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