@aki, part of my daily bread comes from engaging clients in this very discussion. whenever doing an energy audit, you factor in peak power (which i suspect is what you are basing your design philosophy on). Designing systems based on peak power consumption is an unnecessary overkill. Very rarely will you need to power on all your guzzling electric equipment at the same time, unnecessary; impractical at the very least.
The best approach is usually to look critically at the electricity power consumption over a certain period of time, if you get a bill of say 200 units every month, how is the distribution of your consumption across the board. many times this yields a far lower "peak" than the mathematical peak. Remember also that even the heaters and cookers rated 1500 KW each only consume these at max power. using the analogy of a gas cooker, few meals are cooked with the gas dial at max. Same applies to amperes bro.
On energy consumption of for example the fridge, once you cool, little energy is used to pump in some cold to compensate for losses, since a refridgerator is designed to minimize these losses, unless you leave the door open, few fridges will consume more than 300W. same goes to a lot of things.....
FYI a 15KVA power consumption at current rates (about 20bob a KWH) is approximately 216,000 monthly electricity bill... I doubt we are talking of this kind of range in this context.
... and I rest my case.
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 2:39 PM, aki
<aki275@gmail.com> wrote:
@Philip, thnks. Did you know that the simple electric kettle consumes 1800Watts? I don't dispute that LPG is cheaper than electricity costs, but since there's no LPG around what are the options? Expensive power bills or nothing. My design of 15KVA as a base consumption is based on years of using backup supplies and various tests performed to find a suitable balance. It either means you deprive yourself the essentials or just create a proper system to handle almost anything. Also if the cost of the LPG is going to shoot up, then it makes more sense to go full electric, i.e if KPLC can sustain regular supply. No one loves a half-baked cake. :-)
Here's a document I found just now on the net, gives the basics on KVA usage of devices:
HTHs.
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