Thread: Next time you think your shed wiring is a bit dodgy....

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How about this tangle?
Don't even think there is cannabis involved.

I think the excessive electricity bill gives them away. They should have gone solar .

Regards
Paul

To avoid an excessive electricity bill, they bypassed the meter - that was what got ACTEW out to investigate in the first place.

As I keep wondering, why do they keep using domestic houses? The sort of power use a grow house has stands out a mile in a residential area!

If they had done it in an industrial suburb, the cheaper rent would have offset paying for the power, and higher power use wouldn't be out of place - and you'd have a big roller door to drive a van inside when time comes to harvest it, and no-one would be the wiser!

Originally Posted by Master Splinter

To avoid an excessive electricity bill, they bypassed the meter - that was what got ACTEW out to investigate in the first place.

As I keep wondering, why do they keep using domestic houses? The sort of power use a grow house has stands out a mile in a residential area!

If they had done it in an industrial suburb, the cheaper rent would have offset paying for the power, and higher power use wouldn't be out of place - and you'd have a big roller door to drive a van inside when time comes to harvest it, and no-one would be the wiser!

Voice of experience?

...it's such simple advice...it's like "Don't do burnouts and exceed the speed limit when the back of your station wagon has garbage bags full of weed on the back seat". But they keep doing things like that!!!!

At least the sparkie who did that layout doesn't appear to have been trying the product!

Originally Posted by Master Splinter

...it's such simple advice...it's like "Don't do burnouts and exceed the speed limit when the back of your station wagon has garbage bags full of weed on the back seat". But they keep doing things like that!!!!

At least the sparkie who did that layout doesn't appear to have been trying the product!

Maybe that's what the smart ones are doing now. We just don't know about it

TT

I was musing on this the other day - my nice, classy street has had several busts of plantations in rented houses over the years.

I beats me why they don't just run part of the plant through the regular power board and pay the bills and only have a partial bypass to run the main plant - its not rocket science to look at your regular power bill and see how much power is used on average, then hook up that many lights to the regular board. I suppose we just never hear about the smarter ones - its like the perfect murder, its only perfect if nobody ever notices at all - we just see the dumb and/or greedy ones.

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

I think the excessive electricity bill gives them away. They should have gone solar .

Regards
Paul

Beat me tuit. I was going to suggest a solar roof with Powerwall cells. You can even run 3-phase off them (but you need a few).

Reading up about them a few weeks ago made me think that Mike Baird might just be making a very astute decision to sell off the grid - I suspect that grids have a very limited useful life now, and that the future income potential is very limited indeed. O'course you'd have to think that potential purchasers of the NSW grid would be aware of Powerwalls....wouldn't you???

There is a very interesting video on Youtube. Elon Musk isn't much of a public speaker, but his message is profoundly important.

Brett

I have long advocated that potentially every house is a power station and, if the Tesla claims are true, that has just come a step closer.

I think illegal drug laboratories and hydroponic growers of illicit grasses everywhere will embrace the concept.

The only slight hitch, for them, is a house roof, garage, carport, shed and lawn locker completely covered with photo voltaic cells .

I can see a time when not only will you have to attach a water tank to your new house when it is built, but also solar panels to power it.

Elon Musk was still a little light (sorry) on the pricing side and we know how much US$3500 will be once it gets here . So price is likely to be an issue for a long time. However the Tesla cars are exceptional (and also expensive) so I would expect their power wall to be mostly all they claim it is.

No, I would not be keen to invest in a fossil fired power station.

Regards
Paul

Edit:
PS: Apologies for going a little off track. I am self flagellating in atonement as you read this.

A nice thought but you can't do away with the grid. Blocks of 500 units do not have enough roof space to provide for half a dozen units let alone 500.
Heavy power users like industrial and commercial sites also cannot generate enough power. Aluminium smelters can barely get enough power now.
Still, I wouldn't be paying good money for the Poles and Wires.

Solar and batteries sounds great, charge batteries through the day and use them at night, and the Tesla stuff seems much better priced than units I've seen in the past few years. I'll look at incorporating one into our solar unit when they are available here.... Can we get rid of the network? I doubt it, for a long time..... until technology vastly improves storage and/or solar efficiency to a point where this will all work through periods of cloudy days, or winter.... this time of year our solar helps, but barely - and there certainly isn't enough to charge batteries after the fridges etc suck up the produced energy.

I think once people start charging battery banks in off-peak to use in peak, that the power companies will 'review' tariffs pretty quickly....

If solar was global, you would be able to draw power from somewhere any time.

Battery technology is going to change out of sight in the next short while. A major breakthrough in Aluminium Ion technology would seem to be the next big thing. In the following news article they are only talking about the use in cell phones, but the implications are enormous:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-0...ntists/6376406

Had a thread running about that a little while ago:
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f13/alum-ion-battery-discovery-implications-power-tools-194036


So, imagine your house panels (inside and/or out) storing all your electricity for you. Superquick to charge, a 1000 times the number of charging cycles (so a 1000 times less the recycling old batteries problem), and so it goes on.

As time and technology go on the solar panels will become much more efficient, smaller and cheaper. I seem to have read somewhere that there's photo-voltaic paint around now, although hell expensive in it's infancy.

in saying that, the combined knowledge of world tech countries it will happen. united Arab Emergence now require that all new housing have solar, wind, water and waste recovery. there are places in Europe that are now on wind, sea and solar power only. I have a pen pal in a parish in Ohio that completely removed them selves from the state grid. and were my parents live in the retirement village all the duplex have been built north south so that the 12 solar panels on the roofs of every building this goes back to the main grid, there are 320 units X !2 panels plus 1 solar hot water panel per unit.