The graph is from the electric company website showing my usage for a single day last week. It was sunny all last week, so pretty much every day’s usage looks like that graph. The little peaks around 1pm are when I made lunch since I can’t run the electric range from the power station. I could have run things for about 3-4 more hours from the power station, but I like to end the day with it charged to at least 90% in case I need to use it for a power outage.
This is just my trial PV setup with 800W of PV on the south-facing side of the house and another 800W on the west-facing side so I get a pretty continuous 600W throughout the day. I’m currently using an Anker Power Station which is limited to 60V and 600 watts of input, so I’m not getting the most out of my PV panels.
Today I ordered two, big 16 KWh batteries and a 10KW inverter to finally start my “big boy” PV installation (for comparison, that’s 32x the capacity of this power station and 5x the total wattage in addition to supporting 220v split-phase). That will let me take better advantage of the panels since I can put all 8 in series for less losses (partial shading notwithstanding).
I’ve been planning on building this out all winter and am finally seeing it through. Totally unrelated (/s), but my electric rate just got hiked another $0.01/KWh so I wanted to get this in place before A/C season kicks in.
What’s the cyclical wave every ~3 hours or so?
Maybe fridge/freezer?
So sick. I wish I could install solar where I live
I don’t know where you life and what your rules are. But here in EU(NL) is now also possible for renters to put a solar panel on their balcony.
Or avoid all the rules, and use an camping off-grid power system
Oh nice! Ive been thinking of doing something similar.
It’s been pretty great even with this little setup I have now.
I’ve been wanting to do this for years, so I finally justified the cost of the big system I just bought by combining it with my need for a backup generator. I could stretch 30 KWh of battery to about 2-3 days even with no sunshine to top them up. I may still get a small generator as a backup backup just to charge the batteries, but I won’t have to spring for a Generac and having that plumbed into the gas and wired in. Plus those don’t seem super reliable as both neighbors who have those always seem to have service techs coming and going.
I would love to know more if/when you get the whole thing set up!
PGE is killing me.
Maybe I can post a parts inventory or something and some highlights from the install.
I’ll definitely be taking pictures as I go if nothing else than for having a reference of what goes where. The PITA part is going to be moving most (all?) of my circuits from the main panel to the new panel I’m putting in on the other side of the basement. The PV inverter(s) will feed that panel and distribute them out. Main panel (too expensive to move) will then just have a few 60A circuits running to the PV inverter(s). I’ll probably also throw in a bypass switch so I can isolate the inverters for maintenance and whatnot.
If grid tie is an option for you, I’d recommend that if you’re just looking to cut your electric bill. It’s technically an option for me, but the electric company makes you jump through so many hoops and red tape that it’s just not worth it. Plus, I also want this to work “off grid” as a backup power solution in lieu of a whole house generator.
Nice! Good to see more people trying to run on there own power more.
Do you have/did you check into a hybrid invertor, or do you manual swap the power around?
The small setup I have now is based on this so I currently have to manually move where things are plugged in, but the 10 KW inverter I just bought is a hybrid one.
It’ll charge, invert, and load balance automatically and there’s configuration you can program to set the cutover levels, charge/discharge limits, whether it should prioritize power the loads or charging the battery, and such. It can also mix utility and inverter power and switch between the two pretty seamlessly (10ms switchover which is comparable to a UPS).*
*According to the data sheets, anyway. I ordered it today and wont’ have it until probably close to end of the month.
Ahh, a power station. I have on of those too for camping and using it at home to let the 3D printer run off-grid on some spare camping solar panels.
For the house I’ve used a hybrid invertor. It can do all of the same functions but can do much more power, and it can also zero the meter (no import and export, since it automatically tries to compensate for your usage, whole house-wide)
Are there any platforms you use to try and outmate things yet? Or integrate it to track power usage?
