HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND: Could You Live Off-the-Grid Part II: (Electric) Power to the People September 25, 2009
Posted by Kelly in : Big Island Hawaii, Could You Live Off-the-Grid?, HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND, Resources, Updates , add a commentHERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran
Could You Live Off-the-Grid Part II: (Electric) Power to the People
In my discussion of catching rainwater, last time, I neglected to mention that in some places it’s possible to draw water from a well, especially if your land is near to places where Hawaii County draws its water. But finding a reliable and sufficient source of water underground is not easy, and on the drier, western side of the island, wells have to be drilled very, very deep. So, you may get lucky. Or not. And the cost of drilling could exceed the cost of a catchment tank. Besides, a well needs a pump – and that means you need electricity.
There are four ways that people here generate their own electricity: fuel, wind, hydro, and solar. I’ll cover the first three now, and discuss solar next time.
- Fuel. By far the easiest way to get power is to buy a generator, keep it stocked with whatever it burns — typically either diesel or propane — and run it until your batteries are charged, roughly six hours a day. With either fuel, you can assume that your electricity will cost a few hundred dollars a month — about what you’d pay Hawaii Electric Light Co. (HELCO), the local utility. Generators are not expensive, but you should balance that low initial investment against the certainty that the price of fossil fuels will keeping going up, even if renewable alternatives like bio-diesel or methane enter the mass-market. (No matter how you make your own power, if you live off the grid you should have a generator anyway, even if it’s only a portable gasoline model, for backup or emergencies.)
- Hydro. If you have a good-size stream on your land, a hydroelectric turbine may be the way to go. The machinery is not very expensive, and you do not need a waterfall, as long as the water level drops at least 40 feet from the intake point down (through a pipe) to the turbine. But the stream has to run year-round, and in a drought lasting several weeks, even some large streams may shrink or dry up. Ironically, the only serious disadvantage to hydro is that under normal conditions you may get too much power from it! Unlike breezes or sunshine, streams run 24/7. After your batteries have been fully charged, any excess electricity can damage your system: it must either be stored (in yet more batteries) or consumed immediately. One fellow I know had to buy a chest-freezer and an air conditioner solely to soak up all the electricity from the turbine in his stream.
- A stream this big could genereate electricity, but only if the water level drops 40 feet or more from the intake point down to the turbine.
- Wind. A small windmill may generate enough power for a barn (or a well-pump) but a windmill sufficient to power a household must be quite large, and hence expensive. On this island, that’s a viable option only if your land is really windy, which you’ll know because your trees are bent over, as they are near HELCO’s “wind farms” — clusters of turbines – -at the northern (Kohala) and southern (Ka’u) capes. On the Hamakua Coast, the onshore tradewinds are not constant; and on the Kona coast, daytime breezes tend to die down at sunset.
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The September Newsletter is published. September 25, 2009
Posted by Kelly in : Newsletter , add a commentThe September Newsletter is published.
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HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND – Could You Live Off-the-Grid? September 21, 2009
Posted by Kelly in : Big Island Hawaii, Could You Live Off-the-Grid?, HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND, Moving to Hawaii , 6commentsHERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran
Could You Live Off-the-Grid?
Notice, please, the question is “Could you . . . ?”
You certainly can live where none or only some of the Big Island’s commercial services – water, electricity, telephone, television, internet – are piped into your home for a monthly fee.
And you don’t have to rough-it to live off-the-grid. You can enjoy a thoroughly up-to-date lifestyle, with all the accoutrements of a modern home, without being a customer of any commercial utility. In this and the next few blogs, I’ll tell you about the challenges and the strategies of acquiring for yourself the necessities of life here on the Big Island.
Water comes first, of course. Hawaii County has an extensive water system of wells, pumps, pipelines and meters, with high quality and modest rates. But where 40 or more inches of rain fall every year, you can reliably collect your own water from the gutters on your roof. Rain is (shall we say) especially abundant in Hilo and Puna; so even in neighborhoods, there, where County water is easily available, some homeowners choose to use catchment tanks.
- This house, though only seven miles from downtown Hilo, is entirely off the grid. The water tank – a metal frame lined with plastic – is in the foreground. The roof also has photovoltaic panels for generating electricity.
A so-called “family of four” should have at least a 10,000 gallon tank, which is generally a cylinder about twelve feet in diameter and eight feet high. Although some old redwood tanks are still in use, and are aesthetically quite pleasing, they are rarely if ever built nowadays. More common – and actually better, because they do not decompose – are tanks made of sheet metal and lined with tough plastic liners (very much like above-ground swimming pools), or tanks made of ferro-concrete (in which cement, sprayed onto a metal “rebar” frame, hardens into concrete). The latter is more expensive but will last much longer. Also, since rainwater is naturally slightly acidic, contact with the slightly alkaline concrete tends to neutralize the “ph” of stored water.
Once you have water in the tank, you still have to pipe it into the house. You’ll want some kind of filtration, because dirt and dust, or fragments of leaves, always wash down from the gutters; and though they generally settle to the bottom of the tank, little bits of stuff do sometimes get into the house’s supply line. But particulates like that are easily intercepted with simple filters which, like their smaller under-the-sink cousins, are typically replaced once or twice a year.
Getting that supply to flow inside the house’s plumbing, however, requires constant pressure in the pipes. Standard household water pressure is 40 pounds per square inch (psi). If your tank can be sited at least 40 feet higher than the highest faucet in the house, gravity will supply enough pressure. But unless your land is a steep hillside, that won’t be an easy setup. Besides, it’s much easier to site the tank close enough to the house to take the runoff from the roof.
So the force that pushes water through the plumbing typically comes from a pump and a special tank which, together, maintain constant pressure. To have that you’ll need electricity, which I’ll tell you about next time.
View Other Posts in the “Could You Live Off-the-Grid?” Series
HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND – The Road Less Traveled By September 14, 2009
Posted by Kelly in : Big Island Hawaii, HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND, Hawaii Travel , add a commentHERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran
The Road Less Traveled By
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by.”
Of course, Robert Frost wasn’t waxing poetic about the Saddle Road. But most people heading from one side of the Big Island to the other take Highways 19 or 11, so there’s relatively little traffic over the Saddle. If you’re willing to put up with the lousy condition of the westernmost twelve miles (as noted in my last blog), there’s enough to see to make it worth the journey. At the very least, the trip will help you understand some of the challenges – still unresolved – that the road poses to Hawaii County.
Start at the zero milepost in Hilo, at the intersection of Puainako St. and Kanoelehua Ave., across from the Prince Kuhio shopping mall. Puainako dog-legs at Komohana and becomes a wide, modern thoroughfare known as the “Puainako extension” – which some day will be fully extended, back toward the mall, parallel to today’s Puainako St.
The road heads steadily uphill, bypassing Hilo’s mauka suburbs, and joins Kaumana Drive after about six miles. The last houses in Hilo are at the eight-mile post.
The next ten miles or so wind, twist and turn through a forest reserve, deeply green with ohia and koa trees, and tall hapu’u tree-ferns. But the vegetation thins out as you gain elevation, until bare lava – including one flow from Mauna Loa that nearly reached Hilo in 1983! – becomes the dominant feature of the landscape.
But at the 19-milepost, a true highway begins, newly completed, with an uphill passing lane, wide shoulders and solar-powered emergency phones every mile or so. The access roads north to Mauna Kea and south to Mauna Loa branch off from this new section too, on either side of a thickly-wooded kipuka: a high piece of land, untouched by lava that flowed around it, and so leaving its older, dense vegetation intact.
(To remember the word, recall that a puka shell has a hole in the middle).
Continuing westward, you might think you’re in the desert Southwest of North America, because it’s a dry, rocky, nearly treeless stretch of scrub-brush, including the highly invasive and fire-prone exotic “gorse” weed.
About 35 miles out from Hilo, consider stopping and picnicking at the highest point on the Saddle Road: Mauna Kea State Recreation Area, elevation 6,500 feet, where there’s drinking water and toilets. You can reserve overnight cabins there, too; call the State parks office at 808-587-0300 for more information (or go to:
http://www.hawaiistateparks.org/parks/hawaii/maunakea.cfm).
- Mauna Kea
Don’t be surprised if you see military vehicles and soldiers in uniform on the next six miles of highway, as you skirt the edge of the U.S. Army’s Pohakuloa training grounds. The Army has used a huge tract of land to the south, toward Mauna Loa and Hualalai, for target practice since World War II, so it’s littered with metal fragments and unexploded ordnance, including some radioactive shells from the 1950s. Civilian efforts to get the Army to clean up the area have not been successful.
- This part of the road (showing a concrete tank crossing) was bypassed in May 2007 by the new Ala Mauna Saddle Road alignment.
Unfortunately, that isolates the Ahu a Umi (the “mounds” of Umi), an ancient Hawaiian ceremonial site which can not be reached from the Saddle Road. Umi was first known king of the whole island. In the 9th century A.D., he held court once a year on a plateau in the Saddle where, by a trick-of-the-eye, tall Mauna Kea, enormous Mauna Loa, and the much smaller Hualalai, all appear to be about the same size. There, in the symbolic center of his realm, Umi built a heiau (temple) where he received his annual taxes and tribute, in the form of agricultural produce, animals, feathers and other decorative objects and religious tokens. His priests – having no written language – enumerated everything by mounding up rocks; and those stone cairns are, of course, all that remain today. But because Pohakuloa is too dangerous to cross, the only access is from mauka Kona, over private property, and the mounds can be visited only by professional archeologists and historians.
- Ahu a Umi (the “mounds” of Umi)
If Ahu a Umi were open to the public, it would be an intriguing and important visitor attraction, for it is hundreds of years older than the giant Pu’ukohola Heiau National Historical Site, near Kawaihae, and the Pu’uhonua O Honaunau (”City of Refuge”) National Historical Park in Kona.
HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND – Back in the Saddle Again September 14, 2009
Posted by Kelly in : Big Island Hawaii, HERE ON THE BIG ISLAND, Hawaii Travel , 3commentsHERE ON THE BIG ISLAND
By Kelly Moran
Back in the Saddle Again
As the crow flies (or as it would fly, if we had crows here, which we don’t), Hilo is about 80 miles from Kailua-Kona. So you’d think, on an island this big, somebody would build a road from east to west along the shortest possible route. And indeed, somebody did; but it’s never been a shortcut.
In 1942, the U.S. Army needed a lot of space to practice target-shooting – somewhere with no population – and they picked the relatively barren lava fields of Pohakuloa, in the saddle-shaped valley between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. To get their troops and tanks and canons in and out, they hastily built a road westward from Hilo, up to their training grounds; and continuing on, through the Parker Ranch, terminating at the “old” Mamalahoa Highway (now called Rte. 190), the mauka road connecting Waimea with Kona.
The Army “brass” took no chances – after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they realized that enemy bombing could easily destroy a wide, straight highway. So they built the 53-mile road very narrow, with many tight turns. It was never attacked, but it was heavily used by heavy equipment, and after the war – even after Statehood, when it became State Rte. 200 – it was never maintained to decent standards.
Mauna Kea State Park was built on the Saddle Road; and so were access-roads to the summit of Mauna Kea, and to the NOAA weather station on Mauna Loa. But there are still no rest-stops, gas stations, or restaurants; and quite a few miles are still “dead zones” with no cell phone service. That’s why rental-car agencies forbid customers from driving the Saddle in any but four-wheel-drive vehicles.
- Several warning signs are posted at the point where pavement stops and the road narrows.
But there have been improvements, and more are coming. A new center section has just opened between milepost 19 and milepost 41, with two broad asphalt lanes, 45-55 mph speed limits, and a couple of extra-lane uphill passing zones. On the Hilo side, the first 19 miles have been widened and repaved, although the route still follows the Army’s original curves and twists. The twelve-mile western section, however, remains simply awful! It’s extremely narrow, with soft shoulders and one-lane bridges, and many blind curves – some of them right at the crest of a hill.
- (May 2007) New Saddle Road Dedicated – First Section Opens Linking Mauna Kea State Park and Mauna Kea Access Road
The next phase of improvement, in 2010-11, will straighten out the Hilo side. The Kona side is still in the design-stage: the Army, Parker Ranch and the State are talking about a new right-of-way that will angle south, and meet Rte. 190 at the Waikoloa intersection.
Until that is built, however, take the Saddle Road only if you want to try out the new segment or see the sights (about which, I’ll write more in my next blog). It is shorter – in mileage – than going through Waimea, but it will not save you any time: driving from Hilo to Kona still takes two hours, no matter how you go.
