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Greetings all, i thought i would share my small off grid experiment. We have a large plot in the mountains with derelict buildings and raw woods. Rather than demolishing the buildings I figured I would use them! I'm converting this old cabin to a mini solar power station. My priority for the...

Update on basics because i havent worked on anything else... Lighting Currently lighting only an acre or so of the property, total consumption is 110w total for 14 10w flood lights and two sets of 150' string lights across 500 feet of 16ga. Obviously the flood lights aren't consuming 10w. I'm...

Update: Heat although not really solar related, its an obvious issue that most solar households face. It's also 12v and is powered using the Camper's solar power and battery. I went with a 5kw diesel heater, removed the primitive propane death trap furnace, and ducted the diesel heater right...

This seems like a fun project. Totally doable you can avoid thermal limits by running two flywheel boost circuits (one dc one ac) in series to get 3.2v dc->30v dc->120vac the immediate issue i see is a 500va load would present a sustained draw of at least 170amps on the cell. Two or three 3.2v...

Update - negative temps and bms triggers. The temperatures dipped to -6 and I observed the bms charge protect working. Charge protect triped completely around -2 c ambient for the assortment of 100ah lipo4 batteries but i see less than .5kw draw at 0c from a 14kw bank that's nearly empty which...

How would you insulate your diy brick battery while also allowing input and output from the system?

What are you doing with them? You can actually charge alkaline batteries at .5c

Even the most lightweight pc is going to pull 15-20 watts with an active Ethernet connection required to use remore desktop, 20-25 with wifi. Thats 500 watt hours a day, 14kw a month. In comparison, a pi with properly configured polling will consume 2-5 watts, or less than 1 kw a month.

Check for lightning strikes within 50 miles. The light from a strike will temporarily energize your panels.

I like the idea of powering the cabin from the campers solar system however 1. a single 100ft extension cord will not be able to run a hair dryer on a single 15 amp socket with a 100ft extension cord attached. Assuming you have 3kw+ inverter that wouldnt die under the load; you'd still max out...

My priorities for the microgrid are redundancy, modular(cheap) repair, scalable, safe, (low VOC), and never needing to bring the entire system down. With that in mind, cheap 100 watt panels are a no bainer. Each bank is 100w*4p panels feeding a mppt controllers with redundant channels. Only the...

Thanks for the tip, i think a conduit around the edge will match the borg theme. Total solar production is currently 4.3 kw and 19kwhr storage between the primary array, the one substation I've built, and the camper's power bank. With both the 1kw and 2kw generators running there would be an...

This is not accurate. Buck / boost regulators will maintain their set output voltage regardless of input voltage.

40v at the charger would imply one set of leads may have its positive and negative reversed. can you insped the junction box and wirin error? Measure each panel at the 2p connections then at each mc4 plug until you isolate the panel which voltage is out of range.

So following up on the shentek 100ah lifepo4 battery that filled with water. I ripped out a fire isolated ground mount array with some old panels to create another danger zone project. Failure cause: Water penetration at the battery meter or button allowed water to fill the container with...

Nice, did you do any tweaks to get it that low? I have a 2nd gen NUC that best i can get is 15w with Force cpu to lowest state, enable magic packet, 100mb uplink speed, Video card and usb hub disabled Similar to your setul, im hooked on remoting in and dislike cloud gateways.

Wow yeah actually looking at that duration and output pattern doesnt really match a spikey thunderstorm graph. I'm not saying it was aliens. But it was probably aliens ?