House Project: Persuading Woodpeckers & Power Lessons Learned

Friday night my wife and I hung up wind chimes and "wind spinners" (which are shiny plastic twirly things that, as the name suggests, spin in the wind) on the south side of the house. I took some pictures, but it was too dark for them to look good. Our hope is that the combination of noise and moving objects will encourage the woodpeckers to go elsewhere.

Afterwards, we went for a walk as the sun set--and it is a beautiful place.

When we returned, the sky had darkened enough to see Saturn, although I must confess that Big Bertha did not seem to have cooled sufficiently to give a sharp image. Perhaps the problem is that the mask that I am using to get stop down the turned edge has shifted on the mirror. I'll try this again another night. Attempts to find M51 (The Whirlpool Galaxy) were stymed by the sky not being complete dark yet by the time we had come back down the hill. (My wife has band practice Saturday mornings, so we couldn't stay late.)

Power mistakes made: I probably specified too large of a backup generator. The electrician said that we needed at least a 5 kiowatt generator to provide backup power--at least enough to get the well pump running from a dead start. I'm not sure that this is actually correct, but even aside from that, our typical power consumption at our current house is about 38-40 KWh per day.

We ended up getting a 7 kilowatt LP gas backup generator. This is both not enough power to operate every circuit in the house at maximum demand--so the electrician only hooked up a bit more than half the circuits, including well pump, pressurization pump, kitchen, laundry room, and garage doors. It occurs to me now that it would have made more sense to get about a 2 kilowatt backup generator, and use that to charge batteries, in the style of photovoltatic systems. A 2 kilowatt generator, operating 24 hours a day, would charge batteries at 48 KWh per day--well in excess of requirements (remembering that there is some loss from storage and from conversion from AC to DC and then back again)--and the output from the batteries would have been distributable across all circuits in the house. The batteries would also have been useful for later expansion with photovoltaics or wind generators.

Last house project entry.