MY FIRST NET ZERO ENERGY DAY!

In red shows my net zero day

As you can tell from my ALL-CAPS title, I'm a little excited by this.  I've had my solar panels for over a year now and I've never come close...although I really didn't expect it.  So why now?  Well, my wife and I were away in Charleston attending the Cooper River Bridge Run.  The thermostats were in vacation mode, so the house wasn't being heated so that helps.  And without water usage, the water heater didn't need to operate (maybe a little, probably).  So really, the only operating were my normal household loads (HTPC, fridge, freezer, kegerator, clocks, etc).  And apparently it was a nice sunny day (as seen in the pic below) where we got a great amount of solar generation.

Hourly power consumption for the Net zero day.  

Looking at my TED5000 data, my empty house consumed 9.9 kWh, while the solar panels generated 10.6 kWh.  Yes, this doesn't add up t the -0.6 kWh shown, but I'm guessing there's some rounding going on that we can't see unless I download the full data (which should be in watts, not kW).

Still...I'll take a Net Zero Energy Day...well, TECHNICALLY a Net POSITIVE Energy day...

No more water heater woes!

No more ~5kW instantaneous jumps means the water heater is finally running correctly

So, my water heater woes appear to have finally ceased.  Last Friday, the GE repair guys (thanks Jeremy!) showed up and dismantled my Geospring to remove and recharge the refrigerant.  A new error code had appeared (F1) when I opened up the crawl space before their arrival.

From what Jeremy (GE repair tech) explained, there was a chance that the amount of refrigerant was either too much or too little in my unit when they had repaired it last.  Of course, it could also mean that there is a refrigerant leak within the compressor which CANNOT be fixed.  Only time will tell on that one which means I'll be watching this system closely.   But it's nice to see the system working correctly now.  Per the pic above from our usual AM shower activities, notice how there isn't a large jump in the power usage to indicate the electric elements turning on.  For reference, below is an older pic showing the large jumps.  

Before the fix. Notice the large jumps in power usage indicated the water heater elements turning on.

 


 

  

UPDATE: Water Heater Woes Continued...

Temperature in the Crawl Space from last night: next to the Geospring and the crawl space door (Bottom Value=56.1F)

Continuing on from my current discussion, so I'm been watching the Geospring to see if Friday's fix of the control board has worked.  Well, my skepticism has been right.  This AM, I checked the TED5000 and it appears the Geospring is still not operating correctly.  And I know its got nothing to do with the temperature in the crawl space because that's fine...and this AM it was  a nice 47F outside while the crawl space was at least 56F.  The graphs below show the AM routine with showers and such.  You can easily see the electric elements on the water heater turning on (a healthy ~5kW) 3 times over this morning for showers.  The 3rd time is when my wife cleaned the dishes in the sink.

Morning Energy Consumption.  The first big jump and 10-min plateau is the water heater running for my wife's shower.  The second is my my shower (with the 'thorn' on top for my wife's  hair dryer).  The third...well, I'm not sure.  Laundry?

Below is a closeup of the 3rd jump.  What I find a little odd is the "noise" on the graph (the jumping up/down).  That's kind of unusual.  Just look at the data before and notice that the data is very smooth.  And after is a little "rough" also.  Thinking about this...that's got to be the clothes washer.  I'm guessing it must be that little bit of "juice" to keep the drum moving.  Neat, huh?

Closeup of the 3rd turn on of the water heater electric elements.  

Since I can't zoom or change the scale on these graphs, I downloaded the raw data from TED and opened it up in Excel to graph.  The results are below so you can easily see the "noise" from the clothes washer.

Excel Plot of the clothes washer "Noise"  Lots of ups and downs.  

Anyhow, regardless of what the clothes washer is doing, I'm still a little peeved about my water heater still not operating correctly.  It should be running the heat pump exclusively.

Reminder of the weather station next to the water heater with the water heater set to "Heat Pump Only"

Well, I guess I'll get the *joy* of calling GE again and hopefully this time I won't get the rude person who's trying to tell me I'm wrong and I don't understand how the water heater works...along with the threat that I'll have to pay for the service "when they find there's nothing wrong".   If I'm wrong, I'll gladly blog about it and apologize.  Until that happens...which it hasn't to date...

Water Heater Woes Continues...

OK...so recall a little while ago (cue the Scooby-Doo music and squiggly lines), I was having some issues with my GE Geospring Heat Pump Water Heater.  Well on Friday last week, the back-ordered control board finally arrive and week later (yesterday), the GE repair guys showed up and installed it.  As a fun note, the water heater was showing the dreaded "FC/F14" (failed compressor) error when I opened up the crawl space before the guys arrived.

Well, go figure, today I'm getting ready to feed the dog while my wife was showering and I noticed on the energy monitor that the energy usage was sky-high.  Well, what the heck!  I checked and the downstairs heat was on...OK...that's about 2.5 kW (Stage 2).  The upstairs heat was not on.  And then while looking around I heard her hair dryer come on...that's about 1.5kW.  So I checked TED and this is what I saw the following:

Morning Power Usage.  The ~2.5kW is the heat.  The final blip is a hair dryer.  The big jump is the water heater.

 Huh...there' a huge roughly 5kW jump...so the electric element is on the water heater again!  WTH?!?  Didn't those guys fix that yesterday?!?

Well, at this point I can't do any more investigation because I needed to cook breakfast for the family. In case you're wondering, it was waffles.  And yes, they were awesome.

So after cooking and cleaning up I checked on the water heater.  While doing dishes, I did run over to the corner of the house and listen and I could hear the heat pump working.  Well that's good!

After I had finished cleaning, everything I checked the power monitor and *$%&$%, the electric heating element was on again!  Well, now I was free to check on everything.  Below is my series of pictures where I made sure everything was off.  There was no heat on, upstairs or downstairs.  The dryer wasn't running.  We weren't cooking or baking.  And nothing else was running (fridge, freezer, kegerator).  I also checked the temperature in the crawl space...and it was a healthy 59F.

TED5000 showing my energy usage

Temperatures.  Upper is Indoor.  Lower is Crawl Space.  Ignore the time, I've never set it.

Downstairs heat is not running.

Upstairs heat is not running either

Geospring showing it in Heat Pump Only Mode.

While down in the crawl space checking the water heater and taking the above picture you could hear the a click which I'm guessing was the electric elements turning off.  I verified it with the below pictures...

Yup, all heating (air and water) is off. 

Below is the TED screenshot.  You can see the event described earlier (~6:30am) with the hair dryer peak.  And then there's cooking breakfast followed by doing the dishes.  Then everything turns off while we eat followed by the final water heater peak when I was doing this investigation.

TED5000 energy monitor

So I'm going to try an experiment.  I relocated my weather monitor right next to the Geospring.  Not to say it was much further away...maybe 10-15-ft, but now it's only about 1-ft away.  And it is also right next to the crawl space door.  This should be the coldest it should ever read, if for some reason, air is getting through the insulated and weatherstripped door.  It happens, so I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt although one would think that if it were significant enough, I'd see huge fluctuation in the temperature in my entire crawl space...which I do not see.

Geospring with the weather (temp/humidity) monitor now located beside the water heater.  The door is about 3-ft away.

Looking at the monitor now, it is showing a lower temperature...53F instead of 59F.  Then again, I did just have the crawl space door open while I went inside to grab the weather station, then move it over and position it (it didn't want to stand up so I had to put it on its side), and then take the picture.  And even with that, it's still nearly 8F higher than the minimum temp.  So I'm overly surprised that the temperature it lower. 

Either way, I'm going leave this here for a while to see if the temperature drops to below the 45F threshold where it overrides the heat pump and goes to electric.  I *highly* doubt this is the case, but I can at least rule it out.  I'll keep y'all posted.  Otherwise, I guess I'll have to call GE repair again to get them over to figure out why this thing keeps running the electric heat. 

Nov/Dec Duke Energy Bill

I've been slacking a bit on posting my energy usage as I'm hoping to use Groovestream to upload my stuff automatically.  Still working on it so stay tuned.

My Nov and December bill results are posted below.  November (Oct 1 to Nov 1) wasn't too bad, but December (Nov 1 to Dec 1)...wow...I blew that out of the water using 50% more than last year.

November 2014 Daily Energy Consumption.  Note around the 16th how my energy usage significantly increases.

November Bill (Oct 2 to Nov 2) 2013
Total Consumption = 651 kWh
Days = 31
Average Daily Consumption = 21.0 kWh/day
Bill = $64.02

November Bill (Oct 1 to Nov 1) 2014
Total Consumption = 510 kWh
Days = 31
Average Daily Consumption = 16.45 kWh/day   (21.66% reduction vs 2013)
Bill = $63.14

December Bill (Oct 28 to Dec 1) 2013
Total Consumption = 906 kWh
Days = 34
Average Daily Consumption = 26.65 kWh/day
Bill = $96.66

December Bill (Nov 1 to Dec 1) 2014
Total Consumption = 1,202 kWh
Days = 30
Average Daily Consumption = 40.07 kWh/day   (50.4% increase vs 2013)
Bill = $126.46

I wanted to know what I used so much energy in 2014 vs 2013.  Yeah, I did host Thanksgiving this year and had family over, but that really couldn't be THAT much over 2013 given that it was just a week.  

For Comparison:  November 2013 Energy Consumption

Digging in, I see that I ran my HVAC system longer (see figures below)...which accounts for about 70 hrs longer in November (@2.25 kW) or 158 kWh/mo.  That's a good chunk.  Beyond that there's my my issues with the water heater, but that's tough to quantify....maybe 60-80 kWh/mo?  The 2x extra showers with family in the house could boost that a little bit...but that can't be more than 10-20 kWh/mo I would think.

Downstairs HVAC Usage from Ecobee (Weather Adjusted)

Upstairs HVAC Usage from Ecobee (Weather Adjusted)

You can easily see my energy usage spike after Nov 16th (Note:  I was away at a Conference!).  The low on Nov 25-26th is because the circuit breaker which the TED5000 was attached to busted (thank you Squirrels!), so I had to replace it and I lost a big chunk of data.

One thing is that my wife has been on a crazy clothes cleaning binge as she's prepping all the old kids clothes for the upcoming consignment sale.  So an extra 6 kWh/week (24 kWh/mo)?  That could put me in the neighborhood for similar energy usage.

Duke Energy Home Energy Report 2014

In Decenber, my home used 25% less energy than an "Efficient" Home according to Duke Energy.  Damn right!

So yesterday I got a fancy document in the mail from Duke Energy that was my "home energy report" for the year.  I had to share since it indicated that my home is "among the most efficient in your areas and is the envy of your neighbors".  Well, duh...yeah!  As it shows in the pic above for December 2014 alone, my house was 25% more efficient than Duke's "Efficient Home". 

My Energy Usage over the last year.  I'm the yellow line way below the "average" home (blue) and the "efficient" home (green)

They also included a nice graph of my energy usage over the year compared to an "average" home and an "efficient home".  My house is WAYYY below the average home (50-60% less?) and is well below the "efficient home" (25-40% less?).  Maybe Duke needs to revise their definition of an "efficient home"! 

Water Heater Woes

Go figure, as soon as it gets cold, then issues arise.  Recall that i have one of those fancy GE Geospring water heaters that use a low energy heat pump to heat my hot water.  To date, it's worked nearly flawlessly with the only hiccup being a Thanksgiving when I had so much family in the house, that my water heater couldn't keep up with demand in the "heat pump only" mode that I have my unit set on.  So I just changed the mode to be "hybrid" to allow the electric elements to kick-on and produce the extra hot water necessary for ~6 showers in the morning.  

My GE Geospring water heater in my crawl space

Well, all was great until just after Thanksgiving when I noticed I had a lot of energy usage.  Trying to troubleshoot led me down to the crawl space where I found a "FC" error code on the GeoSpring.  Thanks to the "Google", I found this this meant "Failed Compressor" and (apparently) it's not an unusual occurance via comments and blogs.  I went ahead and called GE customer service and scheduled an appointment for after the Holidays (I was traveling).  They mailed the parts to me ahead of time which included a bunch of new parts.  

On Monday, the guys arrived and they plugged in their laptop (when can I get one of those appliance communication modules?!?) and ran a test to verify that "Yup, the compressor is broken".  So they ripped out the old one and put in the new one while leaving me to scramble for PVC parts to reattached the drain piping.

Old Evaporator.  There's a surprising amount of rust here for something that isn't even 2 years old!

Pic i used to go to Lowe's where I picked up a union and a nipple to reattached the drain piping

So after they put everything back together, it appeared that everything was working.  The fan was running which indicated that the compressor was running producing hot water. 

Well, funny thing, the next day I was getting ready to feed the dog when I glanced over at the energy monitor and saw it using 6 kW.  Wow...that's a lot!  So I searched around the house.  Drying not running; upstairs heat off; downstairs heat off; Oven off...huh.  My wife was making some stuff in the toaster oven, but that's rinky-dink...only 1.5kW.  So I set off to the crawl space to check on the water heater.  Suspicious, I flipped the breaker and guess what?  The electric demand instantly dropped...bullseye!   Below is a screenshot of the power usage via the TED5000 and my phone.

Real-Time Energy Usage showing the water heater on...then off at the sudden drop.  And the pick-up when I flipped the breaker back on.

Once I verified, I flipped the breaker again and you can see the water heater heat pump turn on as it goes through its start-up cycle.  Huh...so why was the electric running when I had the unit set to "heat pump only"?  No idea.  So I just assumed it was a minor blip...I made sure the temp was set right and it was still on "heat pump only", then closed up the crawl space and went on my merry way.

Well, the next morning, my wife wakes me up to say, "there's no hot water".  WTH?!?  So at 5:30am I trudged down to the crawl space again.  No error codes present.  So I changed the mode to "hybrid" to enable the electric heat.  As soon as I hit enter, you can immediately hear the electric units turn on and hum.  And the energy monitor verified that the electric heating was on with an instant 4.5 kW bump in usage.  This got me annoyed...why was the heat pump not turning on???  I closed up the crawl space and checked the temperature and even after the crawl space door was open when I was checking the water heater, the temperature still registered 63F..no where near the 45F limit.  

So I broke down and called GE again to get my unit serviced.  After the troubleshooting guy argued with me about the crawl space temperature (I monitor it...trust me, I know it stays between 60-65 all year round...coldest ever was 58F), I got an appointment with a stern warning that if they don't find anything wrong with the unit, they'll charge me.  Since then I got a call from one of the service guys who I talked through what I saw (very nice gentlemen) and they suspect it's the control board.  So that's been ordered...and actually its on back-order...with a tentative appointment to replace it on the 20th.  I'm really hoping that'll fix it. Luckily, this is all no-cost to me since it's well within its 10-year warranty.  

Today's energy usage on TED.  Maybe that step around 5-6am is for the water heater?  After 7am is the dryer.  At ~8pm (19:00) the previous day you can see the water heater come on for the kiddo bath-time usage

This AM, I did try to check to see if the electric water heating was on, but I can't see it on the graphing which is odd  (maybe it is hidden in there around that 4.5-5KW area before 7am?).  Granted I didn't get the opportunity to go to the crawl space and check.  There was plenty of hot water this AM which was nice given that it was a frosty 11F outside (20F colder than yesterday).  

Anyway, we'll see if and how this gets resolved. It's a little annoying that this is happening to a fairly new unit.