101–110 of 234 posts
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5kW of panels don't produce 5kW in winter, that's the issue I guess.
Correct, they will produce more. Solar panels produce the most power on cold winter days. The 'rated power' is for 20 degrees ambient at full (90 degrees, no cloud) incidence at sea level.
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> Still not sure how I’ll ultimately get around this. If it's portable, your option works well. For year round off grid use, there's something to be said for sealed lead acid, or flooded lead acid - they don't care about being cycled while cold (capacity is down and the voltage sags a good bit), and as long as they don't get too deeply discharged, they don't freeze. A single panel, facing south, absolutely vertical,…
Yep. Unless you've got running water or a high cliffside for wind, the best off-the-grid heat source for cold climates is an acre of woods and an axe. Insulation, too. A lot of sheds and cabins (and single-family homes) could do with more. Saves on cooling bills in the summer, too.
Anyway, in a cold climates like mine an acre would not be enough to keep you warm because trees grow slow when it's winter six months out of twelve. It takes a lot of wood to keep you warm, and one tree gives surprisingly little wood. After a handful of years you'll have clearcut your measly acre and still have another couple of decades to go before it becomes harvestable again. I'd say you want at least 10 acres if you manage it well and the soil and drainage are at least half decent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct, they will produce more. Solar panels produce the most power on cold winter days. The 'rated power' is for 20 degrees ambient at full (90 degrees, no cloud) incidence at sea level.
In practice it's kWh you care about, and you get significantly fewer hours of sun in winter. No cloud days are rare in some regions in winter too.
Will Prose seems like a really great person. If you’re interested in what you see on this site, check out his YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/c/WillProwse
I have seen enough of his videos to know that he can be spectacularly wrong (dangerously so) about some of his stuff and if you are not already very knowledgeable about this then you may well end up following some very bad advice. This guy has far more practical experience and seems to be less error prone, and also does not shy away from showing when he gets it wrong, which is often far more valuable than a polished…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen enough of his videos to know that he can be spectacularly wrong (dangerously so) about some of his stuff and if you are not already very knowledgeable about this then you may well end up following some very bad advice. This guy has far more practical experience and seems to be less error prone, and also does not shy away from showing when he gets it wrong, which is often far more valuable than a polished…
Interesting. Can you give examples about when he's been dangerously wrong?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen enough of his videos to know that he can be spectacularly wrong (dangerously so) about some of his stuff and if you are not already very knowledgeable about this then you may well end up following some very bad advice. This guy has far more practical experience and seems to be less error prone, and also does not shy away from showing when he gets it wrong, which is often far more valuable than a polished…
Interesting. Can you give examples about when he's been dangerously wrong?
https://jacquesmattheij.com/long-range-ebike/
As a result I have a very long article on Lithium Ion battery safety and pack construction in the works, but exactly for the reasons the GGP lists I'm pretty careful about releasing that, I want to triple check everything before putting it out there to ensure that the net result is a positive one.
Also: I don't like the youtube format for stuff like this. It would be far better to have these things as blog posts rather than as videos, that would make them much more searchable and easier to annotate.
But just to give you two memorable items: at some point Will shows himself working with naked steel tools on a massive, fully charged, unfused battery pack. Just one wrong move or a dropped tool and the carnage would be substantial. That shows to me that he may have good theoretical knowledge but doesn't really know all that much about working with this stuff in practice and how to do so safely. In another video there is a whole slew of balance wires coming out of a pack, crossing and recrossing with abandon. Balance wires are usually not fused, the wires rubbing means that if that installation were for long term use that eventually the balance wires would short out and if you're lucky it would just result in a balance wire evaporating, if you're unlucky it would start a fire right next to a massive Li Ion battery, something that you really don't want to do because of their thermal sensitivity. The risk is that the whole pack would ignite and good luck putting that out.
I went to the ETS in Amsterdam, a school for electrical technicians, mid level. The one thing that was drilled into us over and over again during the practical parts of that education is that in the electrical world there are young safe technicians and young sloppy technicians, but there are no old sloppy technicians.
Will is still young.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
5kW of panels don't produce 5kW in winter, that's the issue I guess.
Correct, they will produce more. Solar panels produce the most power on cold winter days. The 'rated power' is for 20 degrees ambient at full (90 degrees, no cloud) incidence at sea level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct, they will produce more. Solar panels produce the most power on cold winter days. The 'rated power' is for 20 degrees ambient at full (90 degrees, no cloud) incidence at sea level.
That really depends on how far north you live. Where I live a good winter day's production is ~10% of a good summer day's. (Also depends on the orientation, but it's never even close, let alone more)