By Mimi Moffat, Sierra Club Kansas Chapter
My challenge to you last month was to label your electrical panel. My pro tip was that it’s not a one-person job. Seriously. I did it with the help of my contractor’s top guy of all trades, my buddy Travis. We logged 7 hours on this project and our brains shorted out after each session. We may be tweaking it too if we overlooked something or find something screwy in the wiring.
I tracked our breaker explorations in WordPerfect. (It’s called that for a reason.) It was easy to create a table that was easy for me to read and it fit a standard letter sized page, front and back. I gave up on Excel but that’s another option and my friend Billy gave me an insane template for an accordion fold page you can put in a holder at your panel. If you’re interested, I’ll send you my file in WP or Word.
I have 36 breakers on the main pane; and 20 on the subpanel. All are 15 amps except for the furnaces and heat pumps. I was amazed to learn that our tankless water heater has 5 breakers and our two sets of heat pumps and furnaces occupy 8 30-amp breakers.
At this point, I have no idea how much power my critical applications draw. And, the final determination of what’s critical will be partly based on cost to run them.
What do we need for health and comfort and what can we do without? Do we need all 5 sump pumps? Yes, that's crazy and we did not install them. We did grading and French drains.
My plan is to look at the Evergy bills to see how much electricity we use at different times of the year. We probably can't afford whole house backup (and we don't want Tesla Powerwalls at any price) with solar panels. I’m open to the possibility that this whole project may not be financially feasible.
So far, our winter storms brought snow without high winds. If we can’t be sure that we can live comfortably for several days during an electrical outage, then we may have to abandon our solar dream.
Maybe I’ll have more of an update next month.
Here's a great resource if you're thinking about a solar installation. Homeowner's Guide to Going Solar