I just recently started using a solar charger to charge a 10k mah battery pack that I use to charge my phone every night. One device “off the grid.”
Short of installing solar on my home I’d really love to be able to charge a large battery that would output 120V so I could use household appliances “off the grid.”
Does anybody have some other energy hacks, or ways to reduce your energy consumption at home that’s not just “use less energy?”
Thanks for the recommendations! The silica is a little out of my budget but definitely more affordable than installing solar for your house.
That heating idea sounds cool, but I can’t DIY something like that anytime soon. Also sounds high maintenance and risky. Where I’m at most energy consumption goes towards cooling instead of heating. Any cooling tips?
You can try a swamp cooler, which works best when it’s not as humid, put a beach towel or blanket over an open windown with it’s end in a pot of water, so the water soaks up through it. The evaporation produces a cooling effect. Try to put one in a window the air is coming into.
Hm that sounds interesting. I’ll give it a try. Thanks!
Never gets hot enough to need more than a fan here really, but similar ideas should still apply. Cool the person instead of the house. So I’ve bottle or a small heat pump (old fridge, aquarium chiller) to cool water and pipe it around you in some way.
Downside is condensation, but not sure how bad that is if you have low humidity as we are always high humidity.
Create shade wherever the sun shines, on the outside before the sun even hits the house. Focus especially on shading the glass and metall parts of your house. Make it angled and with some distance from the house so it still allows air flow. Mesh will shade less but allow more airflow and tarp will block pretty much all wind byt also pretty much all sun, so experiment with the tradeoff for different parts of the house like near windows or over the roof.
Where I live that’s enough to keep me reasonably, so thats all I know. Probably need to learn more with the more extreme weather we have now.