> $30K
Wow. That's ten years of electrical bills where I live in Texas, and you also have to deal with the increased water leakage risks, any maintenance issues, storm problems, etc.
Building my own solar power system
281–290 of 355 posts
Re: Building my own solar power system
#282Suspect it would have been cheaper to invest money in upgrading the homelab and aircon to more efficient. Not downgrade, but rather moving to newer lith nodes etc. Tackling the usage before bigger battery system often makes sense
The solar system will pay for itself within N years, and then he has free power for as long as the batteries and panels last
>pay for itself within N years
The total outlay in that calc is affected by how big of a system you need though.
If you've got no obviously inefficient gear then yes you just put in a system of whatever size is needed.
If you have easy wins on the consumption side then you do that first.
Silly example but say you could eliminate half your consumption with a once off $100 spend then you do that. You don't pay through your nose for an system twice the size just because of ""free"" power later.
Where that cutoff point lies will require calculation, but chances are old enterprise racks are on the wrong side of it.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Naive question, why run inverters? Wouldn't it be more efficient to run direct DC appliances? We have a building on our farm without power and it'd be ideal to be able to charge batteries and run lights at night It seems to me that we would have to upsize batteries in order to make up for the loss in converting to AC
> Dumb question, why run inverters? Can't say for OP, but DC appliances are just difficult to find, usually more expensive due to economies of scale and not as uniform in voltage (12/24/48V) as AC appliances. If your battery is in a shed somewhere it's also much easier to run a smaller gauge AC wire than setup distribution for your DC power. Most large system are also 48V so you need to get it down to 12/24V which ad…
You also need some sort of battery management, and inverters typically have this built in as well.
So yeah, you can get by without an inverter, but then you need a battery charger manager so as not to overcharge, and (depending on the battery chemistry) something to cut off the battery as it runs down. (Lead acid for example shouldn't go below 50%).
Re: Building my own solar power system
#284I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a small server rack. We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels an…
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean. This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse. Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding…
I'm in the Canadian prairies and we pay a similar electric rate. It's funny though...
> avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
We've got a house in a very small town (pop. 100) and there are solar panels on a ton of the houses there. I've asked a few people about it and it's 100% for grid redundancy. Sure, they save a bit of money on their power bill, but they're basically using the panels and batteries as an alternative to a backup generator. Winters are quite cold here and having enough power to run the natural-gas-fired furnace and a few light bulbs is a huge win when the power inevitably goes out. Lots of people have small generators kicking around too (like the Honda EU2200 that RV folks love) but the solar install has seriously cut down on the need for those.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#285Earlier 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…
Fission first! Let's build more nuclear power plants too. We know how to do it, and it's only so expensive because we got scared and stopped. Economies of scale for clean, safe, reliable baseload power.
Turns out, I'm already on fission.
What I've done is tap into an existing fission reactor. It's some distance from my house, but there's a lot of excess energy there leaking out. I put up some collectors to capture it.
Was really quite cheap to do, and I don't have to pay anyone to actually run the reactor.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI: Neighborhood-level connections are changing starting next January (look up RCP and CEL).
They're in Switzerland.
Yes, how neighborhood-level connections are setup in Switzerland is changing next year.
See eg https://www.swissolar.ch/fr/connaissances/nouvelle-loi-sur-l... (post written in French)
Re: Building my own solar power system
#287The author says that the resale value to PGE is 25% of the buying price.
Is there some way to get a better rate by selling CPU time instead, when the sun shines and batteries are full? Especially if you have your own server rack.
I have computing needs that can wait for 12/18 hours. Would it make any sense to have those processed by distributed solar server farms between 11am and 5pm? They just take data in and send results back, using their own "free" marginal kwh.
It would reduce the need the connect to the power grid, but still benefit from selling solar power indirectly.
Cloud providers may just be so much better at doing this already?
Re: Building my own solar power system
#288This disabused me of the notion of doing it myself, lol. This is super impressive. Hope to one day be confident enough in electrical work. That and plumbing are the areas of home improvement that I still just would rather sub out. But, this is such a cool article. The quotes on solar installs for some reason seem a lot higher than what you'd expect, given all the charts showing the absolute cratering of solar energy…
> This disabused me of the notion of doing it myself, lol. The author did a very custom setup. If you want to DIY with a pre-integrated setup, you can enroll in Enphase's self installer program, and complete their online coursework: https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/manager/registration?_gl... I think EcoFlow may have a similar option.
Ooh, thanks for this. I've been considering some metalworking classes, something like this could also be really fun and enriching.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#289Okay I finally did this earlier this year too and it took quite a bit less than that. Started with impulse buy of invert at an online auction end of January. Installed last panels end of April. 3 months. Quite a bit of it was waiting for third parties or just me being lazy and not ordering parts I needed. I've wanted them for years beforehand so I did some research. For actual labor - it's about half days to install…
Funny how half the battle is just… remembering to order the right parts ahead of time
Kinda by design. Didn't want to do shoddy things or have to re-do which means waiting and taking things slow.
Re: Building my own solar power system
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so easy to reduce the grid load all the time, needs a big battery for every night and for multiple dark days you still need the grid a lot.
Paying reasonable rates for generation also incentivizes distributed storage for anyone who wants to buy batteries and help load shift. Large neighborhood batteries seem to make a lot more sense to me than batteries in every home.
> Large neighborhood batteries
Boy people hated their HOA before, imagine how much they'll hate their HOA (because neighborhood batteries would need to be owned by someone, and that someone is the HOA) when they can cut off your power bc you left a garbage can out too long!