DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We had a timer installed on the well pump today. The “Pump Man” related that he’d just installed the same timer the previous day, for another solar-power home.

“So you’re on a Time-of-Use meter, right?” he asked. I was pleasantly surprised that he knew the electric-utility lingo. And then he declared, “That means you pay three times as much for power as I do.”

Erm. That’s true, in a sense, but it misses the point entirely. If you want to boil the essence of grid-tied solar power generation down into one sentence, a five-second elevator pitch, then the cost of peak-hour electricity is exactly the wrong thing to emphasize. It’s misleading. TOU pricing is actually a benefit for solar users, even though it sounds expensive.

“Well. The point is,” I began, making the distinction that what the pump man had offered was not the point, “the rig of my roof will pay for itself in about 10 years, and then I get free power for 20 years.” That’s the elevator pitch: free power for 20 years. And it’s Earth-friendly.

The timer ended up being a simple thing: power goes in 24x7, but no power comes out between noon and 6pm. This should be a big help in reducing peak-period usage.

During a recent sunny afternoon, I checked the meters, expecting to see a healthy surplus of emissions-free electricity feeding my power-greedy neighbors. But instead I saw that I was eating up every watt of available power, even though the only identifiable draw was the refrigerator. The problem was the well pump. It’s only a 1/10th horsepower but apparently that’s enough to essentially zero out my PV array.