In article , SF Man
wrote:

I don't have solar yet (although most of the neighbors do). We have more
sun than we know what to do with. It's sunny from 6am to 9pm at the height
of the summer. Rarely is it a cloudy day. The fog comes in at night and
dissipates by 10 am when it's around.

Fog is water. Your plants/landscape should be capable of collecting the fog. Or
you need to xeriscape.

Or you could collect some of the fog for additional free supply of water.



Only two of the pool pumps are constantly running during the day. It's
useless to run them at night because of the solar heating panels (they'd be
solar cooling panels at night). So, they have to run during the day. One
pump is for the fancy cleaning system; and the other pump is for the
filter. Both must run at the same time (2.2 horsepower each). They run
about 15 hours a day. I really have no choice in that matter,
unfortunately, except to put up about 50K dollars and go solar with about
15 KW of panels.

I can't imagine it is necessary to run the cleaning system every day, especially
if you were to invest in a pool cover. Additionally, the pool cover would tend
to heat the water (if it is a dark cover) so you save both water and electricity.

I'd speak to several pool companies and see if your cleaning system can be put
on a managed controller to run for one hour on, one hour off (and that would be
my worst case scenario) which once again lowers your electric bills plus lowers
your maintenance costs. You might be able to even go one day without running the
thing and the next running sporadically. Just seems like you are running it too
long.

Another option is to get time of day billing for the electricity and run the
pumps off-peak.

Have you spoken to your power provider about getting an energy audit (currently
for PGE they are $99 for a full house audit and then you may qualify for up to
$9000 in rebates for upgrades, but they may also have suggestions about your
pool setup