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Building my own solar power system

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Re: Building my own solar power system

#261

Post by philjohn »

KaiserPro wrote: post #163
philjohn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's a bit more than a contactor and an RCD, it also has PEN fault detection because TN-C-S is how most of us are wired up to the grid. Then for use with smart tariffs like IOG there's a microcontroller, cloud gateway for them to hook into for OCCP to turn on and off the charger when the grid is cheapest/greenest etc. So £600 is about right, once you add in R&D, certification, profit margin, warranty claim %…

> Then for use with smart tariffs I wish it had all of that. I would actually pay for that. The Zappi from myenergi promises much but fails to deliver.

That's odd - I've got the Zappi and it works perfectly with Intelligent Octopus Go. Plug the car in, have a HomeAssistant automation that detects this and sets the "charge to add" on Octopus and enjoy the car being charged the next morning.

I always recommend hardwiring it though, rather than relying on Wifi through a brick wall.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#262

Post by bityard »

K0balt wrote: post #162
Aurornis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, Ahh, the accounting style of hobby projects. I’m very familiar with this because I do it, too. Nothing ever feels expensive if you just never add it all up and value your time at $0 because it’s fun.

The total cost of the system so far is about $87k, and operating cost is around 4000 a year (includes equipment amortisation, slow expansion, direct operating costs). In all, for several homes, and a farm it’s very affordable. Getting power hooked up to a single house from the utilities is about $9000, so our buildout is roughly 2x what we might have spent just to get hooked up to the grid. We do buy carefully, and a…

That sounds incredible. This is the first year I've really started digging deep into solar generation and battery storage and it's one big fascinating rabbit hole.

I've looked at it from a bunch of different angles and keep coming to the conclusion that for rural and suburban areas with the space for panels, off-grid solar is the future.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#263

Post by rssoconnor »

davedx wrote: post #121
speedbird wrote: post #88

Am interested in the DC-AC—DC- Battery-AC vs DC-DC-Battery-AC efficiency argument. As in there must be a DC-DC conversion happening to charge batteries appropriately.

Stepping voltage up or down isnt as lossy (or expensive) as converting from AC DC

As someone not into electronics, can you explain how that works. I'm only familiar with transformers which, of course, require AC?

Re: Building my own solar power system

#264

Post by bityard »

vasusen wrote: post #250
thegrim33 wrote: post #218

It's kind of telling/ironic that the author gripes (whether rightfully or wrongly) about PG&E wanting more return on investment due to their risk of doing business in California, but when the author decides to build their own power system to not deal with PG&E, literally almost every paragraph related to their planning/setup contains a mention of some different California/city regulation that the author had to meet o…

This is the key issue. We are over-regulated. We rebuilt our house in the SF Bay Area in 2022 and went fully electric, no gas line anymore. It was really sad that I couldn't resuse any of my previous 12 kwh solar panels that were fully functioning and had another 10-15 years on them as they wouldn't match the new regulations. I tried to get them installed on a separate area in my own backyard for off-the-grid charger…

Wow, not being able to have an off-grid system AT ALL without the utility's approval just sounds bonkers to me. I guess PG&E is even more evil than I thought.

Used solar panels are a pretty brisk business right now. Lots of places are replacing their 10-15 year-old panels with new ones just due to the better efficiency and capacity alone. And now that we have over a decade of large-scale solar experience to draw from, we are finding that they tend to degrade a lot slower than expected and that the original 30-year lifespan was highly conservative. I'm surprised you couldn't find someone from out of state to buy them.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#265

Post by bloomingeek »

strawhatguy wrote: post #239
BubbleRings wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much for these posts! It makes me very optimistic about the future. For the longest time we all watched from the sidelines, hoping that the desire to turn off coal-fired power plants, and research often funded by tax dollars, would get the ball moving on solar. Now that the market has its magic invisible hand on that ball, it seems clear to me we have a path out of this mess. Rant your stupid “drill baby…

That’s silly, why make it political? If anything the political encroachment came from the green crowd first, cafe standards, EV mandates and the like. The best way forward has always been to explore all energy avenues, and that will include fossil fuels as well. At least you’ve included nuclear, but left out fission, strangely, which is the best hope of electric generation replacement we currently have. I’m tired of…

No offence, but everything is political. Much of our lives are controlled by laws. These laws are all politically controlled. To say it's silly to make something political, usually suggests your supported political slant is difficult to justify. Trade offs are only possible when the party in charge is willing to work with EVERYONE, we don't have that now. Thus the criticism.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#266

Post by GratiaTerra »

SoftTalker wrote: post #219
GratiaTerra wrote: post #210

I installed a similar EG4 inverter and battery system and had a similar experience. The big problem I ran into was that EG4 inverters are NOT compatible with my state's power grid (Hawaii) but because I had so much power, it turned out I never needed to connect to the power grid but I am loosing out on selling power. (Check with your local power company before buying!). Another problem I had was that a week after ins…

How many days can the truck power the house, and what's the longest stretch of overcast days you get (in Hawaii, I am gussing you get at least some sun almost every day).

Truck at 100% = 131 kwh, Minus 10% loss in transfer = 120 kwh House using 12 kwh/d = 10 days, up to 24kwh/d = 5 days

Local conditions are typically partly cloudy/rain but still system producing more than can be used.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#267

Post by ploxiln »

brewtide wrote: post #229
entropicdrifter wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over here in PA I pay $0.095, so nine and a half cents, per KWh for electric supply, but then I pay that same amount for transmission, so it's functionally 19 cents per KWh, but maybe the person you're replying to isn't counting transmission fees?

Similar here in Maine under CMP. Something like 12.5 cents/Kwh, but with the delivery aspect factored in it's basically 28 cents/Kwh. I always assume when people on here are talking their 'rates', that they are usually NOT factoring in the delivery fee unless stated. But maybe some places are just really THAT cheap.

I don't know why anyone would not include the "delivery" fee, I think it really is that cheap in many places in the US.

Here in NYC the "supply" charge is much less than half of the total bill. If I add up all the fees and surcharges and taxes etc, the total ends up around 35 cents / KWh, which I thought was rather high until I heard about California ...

Re: Building my own solar power system

#268

Post by philipkglass »

brewtide wrote: post #229
entropicdrifter wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over here in PA I pay $0.095, so nine and a half cents, per KWh for electric supply, but then I pay that same amount for transmission, so it's functionally 19 cents per KWh, but maybe the person you're replying to isn't counting transmission fees?

Similar here in Maine under CMP. Something like 12.5 cents/Kwh, but with the delivery aspect factored in it's basically 28 cents/Kwh. I always assume when people on here are talking their 'rates', that they are usually NOT factoring in the delivery fee unless stated. But maybe some places are just really THAT cheap.

I pay 11.6 cents per kilowatt hour inclusive of everything (taxes too). My household used 647 kilowatt hours in April and the bill for the month was $75.02. The per-unit charge neglecting taxes and delivery is only 7.4 cents. This is in Washington state.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#269

Post by butshouldyou »

amenghra wrote: post #114
cyri wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is a bit oversized. We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery. We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year. The solar sys…

FYI: Neighborhood-level connections are changing starting next January (look up RCP and CEL).

They're in Switzerland.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#270

Post by butshouldyou »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #211
alex-moon wrote: post #10

Having 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…

Love to see housing developments, rather than just adding an overbearing HOA, would instead consider neighborhood power grids (and perhaps a collective ISP while we're wishing for things).

There really aren't any HOAs in the UK. Some newer houses have a covenant which resticts some things but people push back on those pretty hard.
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