This weekend my best friend Bob was in town, and we were sitting around brainstorming business ideas. We tossed around the idea of building a development in a sunny place which generated its own electricity off-the-grid.

Currently, a single home off-the-grid is so difficult to pull off that examples are rare and impractical. Folks living in rural areas with a basement full of miscellaneous daisy-chained car batteries and power inverters - usually home-brewed out of used parts, as a commercial system would be prohibitively expensive. Least appealing, these owners usually have already curbed their power usage to minimal levels to be able to make their claim of energy independence.

For the time being, off-the-grid living seems more obsessive sport (or necessity) than any sort of reasonable option for your average homeowner.

However, we wondered if you were to build a small or medium sized development in an especially sunny area, at what point could the economy of scale (and federal tax breaks, grants, and selling excess power back to grid) allow you to do a professional, commercial solar farm installation (perhaps augmented by wind or hydro)?

After some initial research, it does not look promising.

Compared to alternative energy generation (like Solar), energy *conservation* seems like a WAAY better idea with FAR more short, medium, and long-term impact than the alt-energy technology we have now.

Lets look at some examples.

-A small personal hydro generator (remember, more efficient than solar or wind) off a mountain stream can generate about 500W - not even enough to run my (embarrassingly power-sucking) desktop computer, phone, and peripherals (about 515w). However, it could EASILY keep my laptop battery charged 24/7 through regular daily usage, even if connected to a monitor, kb, and mouse.

Similarly, I have 18 recessed lights in my finished basement. When I moved in, they were 75w Halogen spots (1350w). Now they are 15w compact flourescents (270w).

When you see how much easier and cheaper it is to conserve then to produce energy, generating your own is not at all appealing!

So, yeah, I think you could build an off-the grid development - but the only path to success would be if the homeowners committed to low energy usage as well.

Towards that end, I would like to recommend two products which I have used to great success in helping curb energy usage in my home, and one I haven’t tried yet.

1. Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs - these are more or less a no-brainer as you can see in my example, but they have some caveats over normal bulbs you should know about.

Unless you buy special ‘dimmable’ CFs, DO NOT use CFs on a dimmable circuit - even if you don’t use the dimmer (I found this out the hard way) - they will work, but soon fail - and CFs arent cheap. I don’t have any experience with the dimmable models, as they are more expensive and hard to find.

I personally tried to use CFs for task lighting, but prefer halogen. I have compromised with incandescent ‘miser’ floods over my desk.

Everyone probably have at least a few sockets in their house which CFs would be impractical for - for example, I have some very high recessed cans which really need a halogen to throw light down to the space, as well as some specialty lighting in the kitchen which does not even have a standard socket for CFs.

CFs do have one annoyance - they take longer to get to full brightness after you turn them on - however, I can attest this is very much adaptable. For me, its no longer an annoyance, just a reminder I am saving energy.

When buying CF’s, I recommend shopping around for the best price and buying all the bulbs you need at once plus a couple spares. Don’t buy them one-by-one - you’ll pay more - and don’t ’stockpile’ them - as they are coming down in price and will continue to do so.

2. A Wall-Socket Electricity Meter. These plug into a wall socket, then you plug your appliance into the meter - an LCD readout shows how much power is being drawn - this is REALLY helpful - especially behind your home theatre or under your computer desk. I use it to manage power settings on my computer and identify peripherals which draw a lot of standby power.

This unit doesn’t save power automatically, like the CF bulbs, but instead allows you to do some detective work into which products you use which draw the most power.

Finally, here is a product I haven’t used yet, but plan to order one this week, that many people swear by:

3. Standby Power Strip I have read that there is a standards initiative underway to certify home electronics which draw minimal power in ’standby mode’. Standby modes are what allows your tv, XBox, receiver, etc., to turn on via remote control even when the power switch is off, among other features.

Standby modes are notoriously inefficient, so this power strip will allow you to turn off ALL power to devices when they aren’t in use.

I will have more on the subject of energy conservation and renewable energy this week.