Guy claims he's tired of paying for electricity because of the "ludacris" (sic) costs so he's going to "DIY". Yet, first thing he does is pay a guy to do it.
Building my own solar power system
61–70 of 355 posts
Re: Building my own solar power system
#62> I found three companies and gave them my PG&E usage for the past year (about 16,000 kwh) and got three quotes ranging from ~45 — 55k. Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands. What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs? A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now. And dropping, fa…
Crazy stuff. Ten years ago I paid £5.5k GBP for a 3.7kW system. Since then I would expect the labour component to have gone up but the panels to have come down. I guess the skilled labour shortage in the US is having a very real effect on prices.
Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#63I did build my own solar system too. In Switzerland.
Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.
I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.
All prices without state funding: Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.
Should write a blog post about it :-)
Next project is a solar fence with 6kWp.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#64I'm still curious what you'd need a rack consuming 1kw for… in your garage. From the photo, it looks like lots of storage(?).
My hard drives alone pull 200W idle and I don’t have that many. Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W. Each 10GbE NIC pulls ~40W. PoE switch gives ~30W to each of my APs, and uses ~80W itself, so there’s another 300W. All of my RAM pulls about 250W (admittedly there’s nearly 2TB of it in the rack, but still). Start adding up CPUs idle/average/max power and the numbers get wa…
If I had more than 100 watts in idle hard drives, I'd start aggressively figuring out how to let them spin down. Maybe his drives are actually doing something 24 hours a day? But probably not.
Networking gear taking that much when it's not busy is really unfortunate. Did IEEE slack on adding effective sleep/downclocking features?
Re: Building my own solar power system
#65"they have come out and said what we knew all along: they only care about profits." Not the detract from the rest of the article, but - it's a company, what did you expect?
I’m cynical, but most companies do have some scruples.
Eg basic environmental care/policies or how they handle staff and customers.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prices were high even during the Biden administration. Markups due to subsidies are a part of it.
Subsidy causing high prices? You're going to have to explain that.
- Subsidy starts: prices drop.
- Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise.
- Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels.
(Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
Re: Building my own solar power system
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
1kW is less than a toaster, fwiw. I draw 1-1.5kW for my servers in a spare bedroom. It’s not a lot of spindles/cores, just a few dozen.
Not many people run their toaster 24/7/365
It is always surprising to me but small loads that are on 24/7 end up consuming a ton of energy. My 55W idle "homelab" consumes as much energy as my dishwasher, fridge and washing machine combined.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#68Having done some work around net zero policy I am increasingly convinced that this is the way forward, and indeed that this will be the way things are done normally maybe 10-20 years from now. The concept is called "distributed generation" and in UK each distribution network keeps an "embedded capacity register" which is basically all the distributed energy resources that are connected to the grid at distribution lev…
Add smart storage and demand response, and you've basically got a decentralized resilience network
Re: Building my own solar power system
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prices were high even during the Biden administration. Markups due to subsidies are a part of it.
Subsidy causing high prices? You're going to have to explain that.
Customer is willing to pay 10k. Supplier will charge 10k.
Customer is willing to pay 10k, state is willing to pay 5k. Supplier will charge 15k.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#70[flagged]
Yeah, he spent a ton, but he clearly wanted to stay where he is and took control of the situation in a way that fits his priorities