Zero Net Energy Home

Modern, no sacrifice, living area with no heating or electricity costs.

The Story Behind "Who Killed The Electric Car?"

Jeff Thomas of EV Bones was interviewed by Radioactivity. Jeff discusses his contributions to putting electric vehicles on the road and how he helped the makers of the Who Killed the Electric Car? documentary.

You can hear the interview here. Jump to the 70 second mark to skip the wrap-up of the previous program.

Better Living Show 2010

The Better Living Show is Coming to Portland

This free show offers Earth-friendly living ideas for your home, garden, & lifestyle. The show is March 26-28 at the Portland Expo Center. Green-tech, eco-chic, or smart conservation, you can find it there.

Special activities for kids in the Planet Kids Corner including "Mad Science".

Attractions include:

• Stage Kitchen
• Solar Pavilion
• Vege Village Vegan Foods
• Gardens Gone Wild
• Electric Vehicle Display

Find some ideas to make your life greener.

More info @ better living show.org

Inverter Down

As the January report indicated, our PV inverter died on Jan 19. The error code was "MSD-IDIF". After talking to SMA support about it, I was informed that this is a chipset error on the AC side. The April 2009 error of "Disturbance FAC-BRC" was also on the AC side. Also both of these failures happened soon after a brief blackout. This may not be relevant but it is suspicious.

They asked me several questions about my home:
1) What size is the service main?
2) Is the inverter on the bottom of the breaker box as recommended?
3) What gauge of wire connects the inverter? (8G, 6G...)
4) What size breaker is the inverter on? (40A 2 pull or something else)

I'll get these answers and let you know if any of them turn out to be relevant.

January 2010 EV and PV Report

January's big news is that our inverter has died. This is the second one that had gone belly up since we had our system installed in November 2007. When I called the installer, they asked what brand and model it was and they were surprised to hear that it was an SMA since they don't often have to replace the SMA inverters.

To complicate things, they were not able to fix it here onsite and they were not able cross-ship a replacement. We had our home painted last year and part of the inverter was accidentally painted. This means that our painted inverter must be shipped to SMA, be repaired, and then shipped back to us. The inverter died on the 19th and was taken away on the 25th and it is still not back.

With this month's limited up time, the system only generated 35kWh. This is significantly less than Jan 2009's 123kWh. When the inverter is returned, perhaps I'll try to remove the paint so we can cross-ship it, if this ever happens again. I am glad that it has a 5 year warranty and I hope this is the last problem that we have.

As for electric vehicle (EV) driving, I logged 326 miles using an estimated 228kWh. With the cold weather and the 11 year old batteries, they started to "complain" (battery life light) near the end of my 20 mile commute even though I had more than 50% charge left. So during the coldest week, I drove the Honda rather than the Chevy S10 Electric. This also gave me 4WD which I needed on one of the snowy days.

Next month I'll report the reinstall of our inverter.