This continues a new category of posts: Guest columns where friends and readers share how technology is reshaping their hobby – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.
This time it is Timothy Chou, a software industry visionary. Here he writes about his other passion – leading a green, ecologically advanced life.
“A few years ago, when we paid an especially large utility bill, I got to thinking about how to make our whole house run for $0, at least for power and water. It was not called “going green” at the time but the Web had lots of information if you just took the time.
I dismissed going to any photo thermal system since for some reason our house likes to leak water and putting more water on the roof sounded like a really bad idea. On the other hand when I saw my first photovoltaic (PV) panel I realized it was just an IC wafer - the same kind many years ago as a grad student we used to implement an array multiplier. And with no moving parts and all of the Federal and State rebates we decided to put in 2 PV systems.
The first 1KW is totally dedicated to the pool pumps. With a pair of DC pumps we're able to circulate the water 6-12 hours every day, obviously more in the summer, which makes complete sense. Moreover we designed the pool with an integrated pool cover (no kidney shapes here). So we're able to keep the pool warm (sometimes it hits 90 degrees), and clean for all the months of the year that you'd care to swim. Of course, if the kids really wanted to have a pool party on Thanksgiving we can crank up a gas heater - but over the past several years that's only happened twice.
The other set of panels generate up to 5KW per hour and are tied into our utility grid, so we use the utility company as a battery when the sun is shining and we’re not home. With the software provided by the DC to AC converter people we're able to watch how much power is generated every hour and as a result when you look at the graphs you can see how the days get shorter and what days were cloudier than others.
Having 6KW is great but we still draw from the grid. As a result we’ve moved most of the indoor lighting and outdoor lighting to CFLs and I’m experimenting with LED lighting (which BTW, is really cool – they played a significant role in last year’s Olympics Opening Ceremony in Beijing).
As for water, and in California, that's especially important, we've landscaped with drought resistant plants but I really want to build a catchment system. Many places around the world depend on catchment systems. Places like Bermuda and the U.S. Virgin Islands require them for new construction. I did the calculations for how much water falls on our roof and it turns out in an average year we could live off of the rainwater. Of course, we'd have to put in a cistern and engineer a system to pump the “grey water” to all of the applications that don't require sanitized water. Of course, in the modern world, one has to wonder which is purer?
My long term project (doesn’t everyone have one) is to design a house that could be dropped into an arbitrary property with a given rainfall and sunlight and not require any external hookups. For those of you who live in the Bay Area there are some amazing parcels of property located in some remote areas. If there was a simple (non-battery) way of storing power it might just work – hey, got to watch Internet TV at night. Figuring out the right balance of square footage, power and water consumption makes for a fascinating engineering problem.
Of course, you might guess the pre-occupation with “green” would flow over to day-to-day work and it has. Last year a group of software executives, convinced that not everything is about large infrastructure projects, founded a new company that uses some of the basic principles from multi-player games, social networks and loyalty systems to build a cloud service that incents people to do the millions of actions it will take to reduce our carbon footprint. It’s going live for several communities in the Bay Area. Soon it’ll be coming to a neighborhood near you. Watch Vinnie’s blog for more details.
Technology has changed all of our lives, some for good, some for not so good – perhaps we can again use it to better our lives, and our kids’ lives.”
Your inspiring and I hope you find a massive readership
Keep the Home Fires Burning!
Posted by: WhichBurner | April 30, 2009 at 10:45 AM