We Haven’t Dropped Off The Planet
Though it seems like it as it’s been so long since I posted. But a lot has been happening personally. Some months ago Iris was diagnosed with rapid onset Rheumatoid Arthritis. Thank you Anne …. who knew that children can suffer from this ….. and with her help and that from a specialist Rheumatologist in Auckland Iris is progressing well. Some bad days of course, but slow positive. steps. We shut down all our accommodation and tours until we knew what the future held, but are now back with what we were doing.
Guests and Tours
Dancing Spider Orchid
We’ve just had our firsts guests, a couple of Ulva Island tours and a couple of road tours, so good to be back in (light !!) harness.
Female Hookers Sea Lion This is MY beach
On Ulva I was delighted to find Dancing Spider Orchids appearing in some profusion. A big change from last year…. lots of plants, but very few blooms. Also signs that Hookers Sea Lions are laying serious claim to the better beaches and haul out spots. Which if it continues, and it will… will make for an interesting summer keeping out of their way. And we can only hope that the stupidity of some folk around what are potentially quite dangerous animals does not end up with some fool savaged, Last year a woman was seen crawling up beside one for a selfie. Perhaps a death wish ??.. crazy !!
Solar Update
A couple of months ago our local garage gave us the sad news that “Kermit” our elderly Nissan SuV had one warrant of fitness left. So we were faced with thinking about a replacement. Initially I had thought a plug in hybrid EV would be a good idea… it could double as a back up gen set for our home solar power system. But on thinking it through decided on a pure EV. So “Sparky” arrived. A 2018 Nissan leaf with just 13 k on the clock. Not a particularly great range of maybe 200k, but as we have only 28 k of roads on the Island, and seldom do more the 5k per day AND we can easily recharge on most days we are very happy with our choice. So far we have done a bit under 1000k at a charge usage of 4.1 k per Kwh. So every 5k we do the car spends around 30 minutes on charge. And so far this has not been an issue. As an aside I had always though having an EV on an Island where electricity was diesel generated was crazy. But on investigating our cars run records/power consumption it’s actually much cheaper to charge off the local grid at $0.85/unit than to run a similar sized petrol car… who would have thunk it !!
As well as the free “fuel” I had thought we could actually use the big traction battery as an auxiliary battery for our home solar set up. Not quite as easy as I had thought, and still a concept in progress.
Fueling Up
Back Up Generator for Our Solar System.
My records show us since August 2023 we have run our generator around 3 minutes per day on average. Initially we had a 5 kw Hyundai Diesel Plant, which as a stand alone generator was a good machine. BUT we had real problems synchronising it to our SMA Sonny Island inverter. The gen set has mechanical governors which thus control the frequency of the electrical output. Ideally 50 hertz. But these were not particularly stable with hertz ranging up to 3 to 3.5 either side of the 50 hz required. Not an issue for most applications but not at all good for us. And especially so as the poor synchronisation caused the 2 solar array inverters to drop off line and the Sunny Island would only accept around 1.5 to 2 kw input instead of the 5 kw the generator was capable of. I could perhaps have replaced the mechanical governor and fitted electronic controls to operate the fuel rack … $3-$400, but instead opted for a simple hand throttle which partially overrode the mechanical setup. It worked, allowing the solar arrays to remain on line but took 4 or 5 minutes to set each time we needed the back up. And then the unit blew the Automatic Voltage Regulator. Shane Brown who installed our whole system lent me his own petrol inverter gen set. It synchronised perfectly as soon as it was switched on. Just so easy, and much quieter than the diesel. A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse, so we now have a 5 kw petrol inverter delivering a good 4 kw AND the solar arrays staying connected, not dropping off line as before. Yes, petrol is more expensive than diesel, but at a daily cost of around $0.20 I doubt it’s an issue.
Economics to Date
We went off grid in November 2021, and since then our total return (in energy saving) and including commercial depreciation is a total of $37,400, or around 18% on capital invested. Without depreciation $28.300.
These saving are made up as follows :-
Electricity ….. $24.5k
Diesel Water Heating/Central Heating ….. $3.75k … (This has only been operating properly a bit over 1 year)
Depreciation ….. $9k
So from our point of view a very worthwhile project.
I arrived on Stewart Island in 1969 as Forest Ranger. Since then I've fished commercially both in Fiordland and around Stewart Island then skippered our charter yacht in the same waters, and also down into the Southern Ocean. More recently we now have "Sails Ashore" B&B, and I also guide our guests and others on Ulva Island, introducing them to the natural world of Stewart island