Welcome!

Over the next 100 years the consequences of unchecked Global Warming will devastate large parts of our planet. The burning of carbon fuels is a major contributor to this effect with electrical power generation facilities, transportation and household heating being major players. As the dangers from CO2 pollution become even more apparent, we are on the cusp of a grand human project to decarbonize our civilizations. Where household winter time heating consumes fossil fuels, a clean, low CO2 production grid can supply households which have been converted from fossil fuel to electrical heating. Such a conversion drastically reduces the household's carbon footprint from heating. Grid expansion is not limited to replacing fossil fuelled heating though, it must also energize transportation. Our cities will require new massive power supplies built using technologies which have no carbon emissions. These new and larger power supplies can be both centralized and dispersed. In a plan to decarbonize our city, what are the reasonable estimations that engineers can make for electrical energy usage for household heating, solar PV generation and efficiency increases for an older house. An older house which is identical in many ways, to hundreds of thousands of other houses in the Greater Toronto Area? The Ravina Project provides some of these basic data.

What is The Ravina Project?

The Ravina Project is a privately funded green energy research project in Toronto Canada located at 43.68 N and 79.34 W. We have used our own resources to turn our home into a science experiment. We want to provide energy use and generation data for the public and do green energy research. See our Project Goals page for more information. We fervently hope that access to our data will be a factor in  giving people the confidence to press forward with their own green energy projects. 

Upgrades and Efficiencies

We have worked since 2007 to upgrade our 1920s era house so that it is much more energy efficient. We use a natural gas boiler to heat the house and to provide domestic hot water. We have insulated the house, replaced windows and doors, swapped out all the light bulbs with more efficient ones during the non heating months and use power bars on all 'instant on' devices. We installed 1.5 kW (now 2.8 kW) of solar panels on a tiltable structure, batteries to run the house in times of blackout, and a bidirectional interface to the power grid. We have built this WEB site to publish our papers and data. In short we have modified our house to be a well insulated, Grid resilient, Amory Lovins inspired house.

Our Research and Data Collection

Our Solar Project began on November 1st 2006 and upgraded on September 18th, 2013. The database containing the household carbon energy use begins in 2003. We are tracking our energy use and solar energy generation on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly bases. We have written and continue to write formal papers on a variety of topics including but not limited to: solar power generation techniques and insights, household thermodynamics (focused both on winter and summer time demands), the War on CO2, modeling the future effects of decarbonization upon the household and the policy implications of what we discover in our data. Periodically we will go off-grid for special events, to test our solar energy generation and battery capacity assumptions. We publish our work/data here on the WEB for others to use. See the Project Papers page for the currently available papers. 

Since June 1st, 2018 we have been integrating the energy usage from a Tesla Model 3 into our household data. We are treating the car like it is an electrical appliance ... which it is. TeslaFi.com provides us with a huge amount of data from the car. After a year of data we will be publishing a paper providing an extensive analysis of the energy implications of this added load.

What's New:  We are working on a new project to purchase and test a clothes washer/dryer in one appliance which uses electricity for power and a heat pump for drying.

Upon reflection and integration of much into our thinking, we have come to the conclusion that a global future that is safe for women, that is, a future that allows women to thrive is the best future. In a real sense, women are the 'canaries in the coal mine' such that, a global future where women cannot thrive is a future where humanity is doomed. This works on so many levels; we are baffled as to why this metric is not more widely understood and used.

A possible inscription on humanity's gravestone, "We couldn't save ourselves; it would have cost too much".