Rationing electrical power

I am experimenting with some extreme rationing of electricity at home these days, family is gone and I wonder how low an electrical bill I can make by not using as much power as I used too.  Mind you that the power is so cheap it doesn't matter financially for me, it is more an experiment to know how much I would need in solar panels if I wasn't on the grid.

I thought about the problems back in the island where electricity was also scarce and you couldn't raise the price to make it work out because people would simply steal it, making the electrical company even more fanatically unstable.  However what could the government do, the people who stole electricity lived in shacks with 1 conductor wires that were hot and a return through the ground in the place they dumped the kitchen water as a conductor for the stake they put in the ground, all to save on copper.  Better to do families that could afford a 2 wire system sometimes tampered with meters as well as prices were also high for them.

We always paid for our power, but that wasn't the expensive part, we had to run generators for the time there was no power, and that was big money.  Anyhow been playing with a Kill-a-watt to try to determine exactly the cost of all devices and I found that the one I use the most is only 44W, a 15" MacBookPro, if you close the lid it is 4W, wow really green, I could even power it of a panel directly as it probably runs on DC anyhow.  The fridge is the biggest consumer at 224w, but it doesn't run all the time, only when you open the door it has been a long time since the last run.

I hope your not annoyed by the Amazon items, I just got the Associates thing and am kind of thrilled with how easy it works, besides somebody some day might actuall by these items off my blog, heck I might even buy that fridge when we finally move, as the $30 craigslist Gibson that we currently have, looks to be 20 years old, it has been with us for 10, and it looked very old when we got it. If it had occurred to me to order one online back then, who knows, we might have saved lots of effort moving this thing in a borrowed pickup.