By Cam Mather

I have a solar powered skating rink and it’s totally awesome! So what is a solar powered skating rink? Well, anyone who reads this blog has probably caught onto the fact that when you live off-the-electricity grid in a solar powered house, everything that uses electricity is “solar powered.” I watch solar powered TV, have a solar powered fridge, solar powered washing machine, solar power toaster... you get the picture.

 

This weekend I realized that the pond near the house could be used as a rink again.  We had been able to skate on it during our Winter Solstice celebration in late December. Usually by January 1^st I’m tired of shoveling the snow and the rink dies a slow honorable death. We have had next to no snow this year and last month we had two days of rain which filled up the pond even more. There were rough patches but when I shoveled off the little snow that was there, the rink was pretty good. And it was twice the size of the solstice rink! It just needed some water in some of the rougher places. I was able to run a hose from the house and use water from our well, and the pump is powered by our solar array. So that makes it a “solar powered skating rink!”

 

 

And what an awesome rink it is! It’s in the shape of a huge oval, which I’m comparing to the Olympic Oval for speed skating. I love to skate around and around and this is the perfect rink for it. Skating is insanely great. It is just overwhelmingly efficient. Now a bike is the most efficient form of transportation for humans in terms of taking the energy you get from your morning granola and converting it to muscle power which then uses gears and round tires to provide motion. I love riding a bike. It’s like wind surfing. I love the feeling of channeling the wind’s energy through my arms which hold up the sail and into forward motion on the board.

 

But skating is a special kind of efficiency. You need cold weather. You need frozen water. And you need steel on your feet. That thin steel gliding over that frozen water provides next to no friction, so you get exceptional speed for very little effort. It’s why hockey is such a great game to watch in terms of speed. Players can blast up and down the rink with insane speed. And so can I on my rink.

 

 

Ottawa, the capital city of Canada,  has a canal which is flooded and freezes every year to make a 7 km long skating rink. When our daughters lived there we often skated on it… along  with 500,000 other people! It was a fun skate, but there were just too many other people. I live 4 km from my nearest neighbor. It was human contact overload for me. On my rink I can skate for hours and never encounter another soul. I’m skating near my solar panels, under my wind turbine and it is a pretty amazing feeling. I’m skating on the same pond where I’ll be deafened by the sound of the spring peepers as I stand beside it on a warm May evening. It’s the pond where I watch turtles and snakes sun themselves on logs, where minnows become small fish and where muskrats often make their home. The frogs and turtles are all buried in the mud at the bottom of the pond right now. My skates on the ice are probably deafening to them and they’re down there cursing me.

 

Oh well, hopefully they’re in a deep blissful sleep, just as I’m in a blissful state racing around and around solving the problems of the world in my head on my totally awesome solar powered skating rink.

by Michelle Mather

Treehugger recently reported that the  switch to digital TVs in the U.S. had rather unfriendly eco consequences. They estimate that approximately 28.5 million TVs were discarded as people replaced them with HDTVs.  This resulted in nearly 2 billion pounds of electronic waste and an estimated landfill cost of nearly 40 million dollars. Yikes!  (from: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/6-trends-totally-not-saving-the-earth.php)

Before the push for HDTVs, there was a push for big screen TVs and now as I drive around at night, and see the glow from the TV in peoples’ living rooms, I am amazed at how many of the TVs are of the big screen variety! Cam and I still have the same TV we purchased just after we got married 27 years ago. It still has amazing colour and works well. It uses just 75 watts of electricity when it is on which is a fraction of what most of the big screen TVs draw, especially plasma TVs which are particularly energy inefficient.

In a chart (available here http://reviews.cnet.com/green-tech/tv-consumption-chart/) showing HDTV power consumption, a typical 52″ LCD TV draws over 285 watts while a 50″ plasma TV uses between 400 and 500 watts of electricity every hour that it is turned on!

Even when you aren’t actually watching your TV it is using electricity. Remember when we were kids and if we wanted to watch TV we turned it on and waited for it to warm up? Not anymore, as TVs have an “instant on” feature and are ready when you are.

The following quote comes from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=choosing-an-energy-efficicient-tv

“According to The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith, a 42-inch plasma TV set can draw more power than a large refrigerator, even if the TV is only used a few hours a day. This is partly because many newer models don’t turn off but go into “standby” mode so they can start up fast later with no warm-up period. “Powering a fancy TV and full-on entertainment system—with set-top boxes, game consoles, speakers, DVDs and digital video recorders—can add nearly $200 to a family’s annual energy bill,” she adds. “

In “The Renewable Energy Handbook” Bill Kemp discusses “phantom loads” which are electrical loads that aren’t doing immediate work for you. Your television is one of the phantom loads that continue to use electricity, 24 hours a day, whether you are watching it or not. When you live in an off-grid home, every watt counts and you sure don’t want to be wasting precious electricity on phantom loads! But even if you are on the grid, with seemingly unlimited electricity, you should consider how much these phantom loads are costing you to run.

Below is a chart from “The Renewable Energy Handbook” which shows a number of electronic devices that are found in many homes and the energy costs per year to run these. It’s been estimated that phantom loads cost U.S. consumers about $3 billion (yes, BILLION) dollars a year. Phantom loads often account for 15% of a home’s energy use!

What can be done to avoid these staggering costs? The same thing that we do in our off-grid house. Put these phantom loads on a power bar so that you can completely turn the power off to them when you are finished using them. This includes your stereo, coffee maker, microwave oven (that digital clock draws power), your DVD player (another clock there!) and your TV too. Sure, it might take a moment to warm up when you do decide to watch it, but your energy savings will  add up and your carbon footprint will shrink!

by Michelle Mather

Cam and I have 24 solar panels on our two trackers. When the sun is shining our 24 panels produce about 2.3 kW of electricity an hour.

Our system pales in comparison to the largest solar farm in Canada. You're probably wondering where the largest solar farm in Canada is located and you're trying to think of the sunniest places.  It's actually about 40 kms from us just outside of Napanee, Ontario here in Stone Mills Township!

First Light Solar Park is currently the largest-scale commercial solar farm operation in Canada and is a joint venture between SkyPower Corp. and SunEdison Canada. It consists of more than 126,000 solar panels spanning across 90 acres and is expected to generate over 10 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of renewable electricity in its first year -- enough to power 1,000 households.

Not only is this solar farm the largest in Canada, but it's also the 3rd largest in North America!

And yes... I'm very envious! What a lot of solar panels!!

Photo from http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=3699