Smart Meters, Start up power ballast vs LED?

[St. Phatty]

what if you bought a battery bank and charged it with house electricity and then ran your lights off that, never to be plugged into your normal house outlet.....?

That or a generator - which itself can be an indicator so you have to manage the generator noise & fumes.

About 15 years ago there was a company named "Active Tech" that used fly-wheels to store electricity.

One car battery stores about 1 kW-hour. So for a 12 hour cycle you would need about 13 batteries (they aren't perfectly efficient).

Solar panel set-ups often use golf-cart batteries.


I'm waiting for a grower to reverse engineer a Tesla so they can use that to power their garden - then charge it at a Tesla station so they don't get booked for the power use.

 

[stoned-trout]

there was a family here in so cal that got raided for high electric use and traffic to their pad...turns out mom was taking in laundry for folks....no drugs found but a really scared family....yeehaw ^^^ when tesla opens that second new facility for batteries the price might drop a bit...

 

[rives]

In terms of residential loads I think you're correct. Setup, maintenance & inefficiency of power conversion would make a UPS system like that prohibitively expensive, I think.

I'm sure that it would be expensive, but perhaps not as bad as you would first expect.

The UPS wouldn't need to support the load for extended periods - just long enough to emulate random load changes and make it difficult to establish a usage pattern that could be indicative of growing. The UPS would help in a number of ways - the initial lamp ignition spike would be filtered to a degree by the time the meter saw it even if the lights were fired while on the utility, the UPS charging cycle when the lamps cut back over to the utility would provide a usage spike well beyond the lamp current, and the wattage utilized would slowly taper off as the batteries came up to full charge.

Voila - power camouflage!

 

[trichrider]

what about ....

a bank of capacitors with that ups that handles the initial spike and then resumes grid usage?

 

[noyd666]

wrong thread wooops.

 

[trichrider]

that was helpful...

 

[Jhhnn]

I'm sure that it would be expensive, but perhaps not as bad as you would first expect.

The UPS wouldn't need to support the load for extended periods - just long enough to emulate random load changes and make it difficult to establish a usage pattern that could be indicative of growing. The UPS would help in a number of ways - the initial lamp ignition spike would be filtered to a degree by the time the meter saw it even if the lights were fired while on the utility, the UPS charging cycle when the lamps cut back over to the utility would provide a usage spike well beyond the lamp current, and the wattage utilized would slowly taper off as the batteries came up to full charge.

Voila - power camouflage!

I started thinking about how to make that work right, came to the conclusion that the on/off selector switch on the ups would need its own timer/contacts, too. Otherwise it'll activate when the main timer goes to the night cycle.

Breaking a large grow down into lighting zones each w/ its own timer & ups would allow for staggered starts & multiple cycles at the meter. Some security lighting timers also allow for random start/stops within a set window of half an hour or so, iirc.

Add solar & the meter will see even more randomness.

It's really just mental exercise for me. Having a legal grow is the ultimate in security. As my methods have improved over the last 3 years it's pretty straightforward to grow more than we smoke from 6 plants. Everybody should have that opportunity.

 

[FlapJacker]

Possibly, but I think that any reasonably good search routine would pick out highly repetitive load changes over time - the signature spike and the wattage would be impossible to change, so diddling the timing within the limits of what the plant will accept without adversely affecting flowering are what you are left with.

The problem is the nature of lighting - there are no other loads that are constant for extended periods. The only way that I've come up with that could potentially beat a smart meter is to use a large UPS and cut the load back and forth between it and the utility at random intervals.

I started thinking about how to make that work right, came to the conclusion that the on/off selector switch on the ups would need its own timer/contacts, too. Otherwise it'll activate when the main timer goes to the night cycle.

Breaking a large grow down into lighting zones each w/ its own timer & ups would allow for staggered starts & multiple cycles at the meter. Some security lighting timers also allow for random start/stops within a set window of half an hour or so, iirc.

Add solar & the meter will see even more randomness.

It's really just mental exercise for me. Having a legal grow is the ultimate in security. As my methods have improved over the last 3 years it's pretty straightforward to grow more than we smoke from 6 plants. Everybody should have that opportunity.

Interesting, thanks for your thoughts guys.

 

[rives]

I started thinking about how to make that work right, came to the conclusion that the on/off selector switch on the ups would need its own timer/contacts, too. Otherwise it'll activate when the main timer goes to the night cycle.

The way that I envision implementing this would be to use a contactor on the power feeding the UPS, with the contactor being driven by whatever control apparatus you like to give the impression of randomization. Cutting the power to the UPS would put you on the battery, turning the power back on would put you on the utility. The lamp timing control would be between the UPS and the ballasts, and handled in the conventional fashion.

 

[rives]

what about ....

a bank of capacitors with that ups that handles the initial spike and then resumes grid usage?

Capacitors do not store AC power, they only function like that on DC. There are numerous capacitors built into UPS's already, and adding them externally is more likely to create problems with the electronics than to help with the operation.

 

[Jhhnn]

The way that I envision implementing this would be to use a contactor on the power feeding the UPS, with the contactor being driven by whatever control apparatus you like to give the impression of randomization. Cutting the power to the UPS would put you on the battery, turning the power back on would put you on the utility. The lamp timing control would be between the UPS and the ballasts, and handled in the conventional fashion.

That's a lot simpler but the load stays constant through the on cycle. With the ups after the timer the timer can cycle the load to the ups more than once each on cycle but it's a lot more complicated & would probably demand some mods to the ups & you'd need a system timer at the front end to handle it all.

I'm probably over thinking it. When the cops start looking at a grower's power bill it means they already have a reason to look, generally speaking here in the US. Something else caught their attention. They're seeking confirmation of what they already have reason to suspect so the big concerns for underground growers aren't really much different w/ smart meters.

 

[rives]

Actually, the load would vary when connected to the utility because of the UPS batteries recharge current being added to the lighting circuit load. This could be further changed by varying the time on the UPS - longer periods would cause the recharge cycle to take longer, and perhaps pull more current depending on the UPS circuitry. I think that the charger that I use for my inverter battery pack has 4 different modes, each of which pulls a different amount of current.