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Quick and dirty ground mount, with some trusses. Long story, west facing.

Tesla has fewer charging stations all together than the others, they just have more fast charger plugs than all the rest combined. EA has ~4000, and now that the hardware platforms are starting to improve other companies are building out their networks as well. It gets harder to stay on top as...

Really people? Perhaps you should re-think the DIY aspect of messing with electricity in general if we are not smart enough to work with it without blowing sh*t up. For example: Step 1) Turn off the inverters / place it in standby / shut the breakers off ... (doh!) Step 2) Turn PV disconnect...

Being forced to lower prices does not necessarily mean things are falling over. One of the big drawbacks to EV is the cost of the cells, doubling the production costs of the vehicle. Demand will increase for electrics if the capital expendatures can come down. I think this will be especially...

Will had a nice review. I have some nits I can pick. I put it all together: The cabinet is a conventional computer/equipment rack Rear doors, sides come off. This is actually much nicer than the EG4 I have. The shelving for the batteries is pre-installed in the rack: It comes...

I think some of this is a little silly. I've been in the computer business forever. The modbus manual is going to have pretty much all the operational settings, they have 'advanced' settings on this box which you can change if you are so inclined. There are always factory things that you...

WSJ Just posted an editorial Tuesday, ... Covid lockdowns and masks accomplished nothing, they used (as I keep saying) raw death numbers rather than trying to use categories compares various countries by response . . . Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all.

My son sent me a handwritten "Thank you for making me do stuff" letter while on a deployment. I will keep that one. My father was never afraid to try and do things, and always had me help. He grew up in a different world where people were more self-sufficient. I think a lot of the folks in...

It's about learning, money, and independence. Electric rates here just went up, and I live in one of the most favorable locations on the planet for solar. I built out simply to see if I could do it, and what it would take to realistically be in a 2000sqft house completely off-grid. I've got...

It is a violation of federal law to use some products in a manner inconsistent with its labeling. You can go to jail. Thus if you take a bottle of anti-freeze and feed it to your dog. Mis-apply a pesticide, you can get sued. The manufacturer is not liable unless it was negligent in some way...

Victron: It may require twice the gear, and four times the engineering to get it going, but at least it only costs twice as much.

The latest firmware improved it, but the 18K's struggle when shifting the load to battery. Also the firmware is a little sketchy when managing two inverters in parallel. Hopefully future firmware will improve this. If either inverter drops out while in parallel everything shuts down...

I've got right at $50K in it. Knowing what I know now, and ... The price having dropped on panels, and choosing different inverters I could have the exact same setup I have for around $35K. But the #1 lesson I learned was actually: Batteries are the most expensive thing you will buy, the...

I have 150A service feeding a panel on the outside of the house. The house is all-electric. I have TWO EV's. This panel now has 3 breakers besides the main. - A 100A feeds the secondary on an ATS common to a 100A sub-panel with everything on it. (on) - A 50A secondary to an ATS that feeds...

"Figures don't lie, but liars sure can figure". No I'm not calling you a liar, it's just you fell right in a trap. You can't take the numbers and correlate them the way you've outlined. I'm not sure where your numbers are coming from, but there appear to be a whole lot of baked in...

Absolutely! Make sure you drink plenty of fluids, you will need a buck converter, and infinite patience!

No, I don't realize this at all, sorry. This is a ludicrous statement on it's face. I mean you realize if it wasn't for the cold war we probably wouldn't have micro-chips, computers, and the internet? Simply because at some point DARPA threw some money at LSI/VLSI, and DARPANET? I mean it...

You need a transfer switch/interlock if you want to connect to your house wiring. Rolling a cart over and plugging in a couple of TV's and fridge is one thing. The minute you tie it to your house wiring you completely changed the paradigm. A suicide cord is a bad idea.

I would think you could parlay enough cash in the auto-aftermarket to buy similar rack mount LifePO4's ready to go with a standard inverter.

People left Twitter for Truth Social BEFORE Musk bought it, in large part because they were being de-platformed. When your options to express your OPINION or worse actual FACTS become limited, you squeeze folks out into other spaces. Things started to fall-over, all-over when "they" tried to...

Everybody likes to oversize the small wires and undersize the really big ones. I also built my own surge box, which I am re-engineering because I have to move it outside with the 18K inverters . . . ran out of space on my rock board wall. The MC-4's will go away, and I'll run it in from 3/4...

You cannot put a price on what you find interesting and fun.

Nah, your full of poopey :ROFLMAO:. Nobody builds/buys what you have for the money. I'm trying to catch up but you've spent serious coin not to mention the "Free" labor setting up all your stuff. Your motivation is the same as most of us zealots here. Bragging rights. Having a little fun...

Flash memory has been around since the 60's. Compressors / refrigeration has been understood since before the turn of the century. The length of time since the principle for a technology is understood, has no bearing on it's viability as a commercial product. In 1980 I'd put music on magnetic...

As a long time IT guy, you learn things about redundancies and MTBF num(lies)bers, and MTTR numbers. A lot of it is just plain math and statistics. The more stuff you have the more likely you are to have a failure. This is something that is sometimes difficult for smart people to grok. I've...

The problem is assuming the impact is going to have a deleterious effect, and that the entire difference is due to fossil fuels. CO2 is generally healthy for plants, and the earth has gotten greener, likely in part because of this. I would be more afraid if we had released something in the air...

One on hand, I agree with this. On the other, I think if it will handle the signaling just fix the port so it can tell if someone was stoopid. Last thing you need is another proprietary connector.

No, that is not what you said. What you SAID was: I called Bullsh*t!, provided receipts, and then you came back with some drivel about me benefiting from the climate change agenda. If you want to make a point, it would help to stay on it. You are beholden to whomever you take the money from.

Ummm, Sorry, can't agree with you here. This is not a microwave oven or a TV you get at best buy. It's more like a split a/c system or something. If you are not comfortable cracking the case, I'm thinking you probably should not have purchased it in the first place. I for one would be...

"Predatory" is in the eyes of the beholder. It bothers me when people use this term in this manner. Now if someone is misrepresenting what they are selling that is one thing, but this looks to be pretty well documented, what you are getting and what it costs. Anyone is entitled to charge...

Why/how does it void the warranty? You can use any MPPT/source you want to charge your batteries, assuming it is designed for lifepo4 charging. Not sure what any of that has to do with the inverter. If those devices are not compatible with lifepo4 battery charging, that would be something...

i.e. There will *never* be a manual or procedures document, because it will *never* be __done__.

I have this new carburetor you can put on your car that will let it run on water instead of gas. No really! So while you are re-inventing in-floor radiant heat . . . IMNSHO this is a hair-brained idea. Even when it works, this stuff always sounds great in theory, but rarely pans out. In...

It's a real shame so many "under-regulated" power companies would prefer not to toss their existing investments. I think what we need to do is just shut them down cold, and re-start all the underlying processes and build out new grid infrastructure. This will surely cut the capital costs to...

Yea but it's $200. That is beyond ridiculously expensive. https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Pi-Allwinner-Computer-Bluetooth/dp/B0CB112MN2/ $24.99 you can get a complete computer with wifi, ethernet, a gig of ram. You want 8 times as much for an Ethernet interface for a device. From a security...

Better yet replace this crap with a screw lug.

So you spent over 8 grand on some batteries, and you are worried about $30? Stunning. I might suggest hiring someone to do the work, or perhaps Ruixu should fly an engineer out to help you for free? Secondarily, when you do the DIY thing, you need to be somewhat flexible, and should really...

I'll try this again. 6 pillars of 8x8x16 block on 8' centers. Plan is to go 4 more up, 4 studs on every third block (M8). 4x4's on the top, then maybe 11 trusses 10x5x~13. Run 1x2 along the bottom want to put a 5x2 array 72x45" panels, strap from underneath, just have a panel roof. Torn on...

Not really, I suggest you fix Spain, then you can complain about the US. Of course most of Europe is actually a US B*tch, completely beholden. Someone from a country that cannot manage it's own budget talking about another country is pretty arrogant. I mean you shouldn't even care about the...

117 yesterday, 114 today, my panels are beyond dirty... Jeez. @B-Mod is still top gun.

Governments do not produce anything, they only leach. Whenever government increases the money supply with spending money it does not have it creates inflation. Always. Period. How much inflation is dependent on how much the supply is increased against GDP. Excessive spending is a tax on poor...

Don't worry, you'll never need the grid, until you disconnect it, and TSHTF. -- Murphy

Sorry. Not "Super Cheap", particularly not at scale. A large scale gas generator is going to be the cheaper, more scaleable and the timeline is not that long. My DIY setup has cost me over $40,000. That's 15+ years of commercially generated power at retail, if it operates flawlessly over...

I briefly had a "100A" Victron Autotransformer. I returned it, and ended up with different AIO's. Seemed to be well built, nice aluminum case. Pretty much impossible to stuff three 2AWG cables in the thing, much less 6. I managed it cussing the whole time. The openings had an odd "gland"...

<SIGH> I should have picked up on this . . . Died two days ago I was returning from out of town, charging stopped working. This connection was a little loose. Was running the EV charger, 32A continuous. I really think you should re-torque screws after you run a few cycles. I found a couple...

On the contrary. Local mail trucks should all be electric already. If I have to listen to that grinding starter as the gal drives around cutting off the motor at each stop traveling between mailboxes to save fuel. . . I asked she said she drives about 30-40 miles/day. This is an absolutely...

The umm 'grid' for my grandparents when I was very young was notoriously unreliable. Not unknown to be without power for 48+ hours, so no TV, and don't mess with the "Deep Freezer" in the barn. The "ICE BOX" was actually, well, an "ICE BOX", ice was delivered twice a week, and the Kerosene...

Just put in a transfer switch, treat your solar like a gas powered generator. You cannot grid tie, with the inverters you have so you don't want to grid tie. Run your service to the meter and a separate panel with a single breaker that feeds your transfer switch.

Doesn't work that way. A DC capacitor will help with a DC load, but an AC capacitor (sort of) passes everything thru with a slight phase shift.

You will pry my cast iron cookware out of my cold dead hands. Induction loves cast iron. Get some hi-temp silicon mats, and put them under the skillet while cooking. Keeps you from scratching the surface. It has to be the hi-temp stuff. I just cut a big square of mat and punched some holes...

In very hard soil like this adobe crap here. Wet the ground && dig down ~2 ft with a post hole digger first. Fill hole with water, and start driving the rod. Fill hole with water repeatedly as you hammer the rod. Take a break to let the water soak on down if the rod stops moving. leave an...

Quit thinking, your making us look bad.

The problem with panels to battery is somewhat complex: Can your panels fill your batteries, and cover a load for a day? Will it be able to do the same for enough batteries for 3 days? 4 days? What is the longest stretch you will have without sun? IMNSHO In a weak solar area your panel...

Trying to get YOU to do this. He couldn't care less. These fools fly around in private jets, live in, and buy huge old properties with horrid insulation and oil boilers, drive around in huge gas guzzling full size SUV's with large entourages, and then they look you in the eye and tell you you...

Pretty well thus far. We are seeing a lot of regulations and controlling bureaucracies being attacked removed and reduced. The government that governs best governs least.

Really, really, really bad idea. Really bad, no really. Magic smoke time.

Every time I see someone getting happy with all this victron gear the term "self flagellation" always comes to mind. No really, it works great all you need is this box here, and that box there, and this wire here, ...

I really do think this is a dumb idea in general. I'm going to put up enough solar panels to run the thing wide open, say 6 hours. No batteries mind you. Thing ends up using 10% of the potential solar production. Add in a small inverter and a small battery, use a regular mini-split, and you...

Mi mamma was raised in a dry county, in the hills of rural Kentucky. Let's just say Grandpa could have used the power wisely, and 'Justified' is not as far off the reality mark as you might think. I'm with OGFG, the best apple-jack comes out when the temperature is stable. Much easier with...

This evening I shuffled me feets across the carpet. . . Ouch touching the metal on the lamp.

So if he's putting the cart BETWEEN the outlet and the fridge, that would give you the ground, bond it to the cart. No different than A simple UPS

Disagree. I'd have a propane heat backup, but variable speed heat pumps today will heat a room very efficiently without extreme electric usage. I disagree. I would build my home all-electric, induction range all electric, standard electric HWH. I would not use a demand HWH unit. This might...

RJ-45 satin cable for phones, straight thru and flipped. Hand crimped T-1's, that's 1/2,4/5 swapped. Old cisco cards . . . I've had occasion to use a crossover ethernet from time to time. Some of the Cox handoffs required it 3 or 4 years ago coming off the fiber gear.

South west is optimal for de-stressing the grid in summer. It takes time for the sun to heat things up in the morning, thus cooling costs do not kick in high gear until the sun has been up for a while. Conversely in the evening as the sun drops, the heat is still there, and cooling stays in...

I for one always buy a 5000KWH battery and expect it to only have 4000 usable KWH. . . . Not. I use 15% as my stop threshold.

Just because your paranoid, it doesn't mean the aren't out to get you! Even in the burbs, you should always have some fresh water, and a couple of days of dry food consumables. I have solar, and probably 25lbs of flour, 20lbs of rice, and 15 gallons of RO water in jugs, a very large bag of...

You have to build for peak demand. I have hit 100A on my 240V/100A panel, albeit only briefly. I routinely hit 18KW (75A) and routinely have continuous loads for more than 15 minutes above 15KW. My home is a modest 1500sqft all electric block house in Phoenix. I don't really feel like this...

(Scowl) Rainy and cloudy the rest of the week. Production has been in the low 30's the last two days, not enough to run the abode. Had to pop on the grid to charge the cars. You'd think I lived in PA or NC or something... On a better note, I should have best case solstice day baseline...

I bought my new 455's from San Tan, drove over and picked them up in a truck. I also bought some used CS-250's (see sig) off Craigslist as-is. They have cracks and some have trails, and all but 1 seem to put out consistent power. They they have something better than about 1/3 the output of...

IMNSHO, It's generally first about demand. You need enough inverter and battery output to meet your maximum demand. The second thing will be storage. The more battery you buy the longer you can last. 24KW is 240v/100A, basically a 100A panel. I used this as a baseline. If your demand never...

Mee Too. However, what you have here is a revenue stream, not power production. Assuming you have a positive cash flow from a smallish PV mount, basically just hooked to the grid, in an inconvenient location for local use. I would let it continue to generate revenue for as long as the power...

Yea, IMNSHO this is the Achilles heel of all these systems. The GF bought this power plug IOT thingy recently, turns out the company is gone, and there is no way to configure it. Good thing it had 'lifetime cloud service' , bad thing that the lifetime was about 3 years for the company. This...

2 18K's makes for a very simple setup and wiring, 2 boxes and 100A of AC output. If you like connecting a lot of wire and putting in bus-bars, and ... then by all means buy more boxes and hook them up. The more boxes you have the more complicated the wiring, but the greater the redundancy. So...

I would recommend doing it somewhere close by as a practical exercise. Find one when you don't really need much get it going, adjust your charge settings, etc, spend $10 for an education. It is a little awkward, nice to have a feel for the process before you actually need it.

This is my first full year of Solar. It's been quite the ride.. Still putting the finishing touches on panels, and trying to accumulate a bit more battery, but for now, I rarely touch the grid. With the removal of the fast but flaky low end ATS's for a more robust one, my transfer time put me...

Not fair at all. We are just generally a bit more frugal. I for one would rather not pay for "Five nines" of reliability for things that are not critical. Things break, they can be repaired. This is usually dramatically less expensive than trying to engineer something that cannot break.

@Markus_SignatureSolar touched me so I downloaded and installed the latest firmware (0E10 / Jul 1 I think) yesterday AM. It took about 40 minutes to get it on both inverters. So, umm . . . it's probably a good idea to drop into standby before upgrading a parallel system. The primary crashed...

One of my favorite sites is suncalc.org. . . You can move the slider and look at the Irradiance numbers. Falls off rapidly this time of year on either side of the peak. This time of year Irradiance is above 800 from 0945-1515, peaks at 940 compared to (say) June when you stay above 800 from...

Had this unit been available I would have likely bought 4 of them instead of the big 18/12 unit. Mostly for the cost differential plus additional PV inputs 3x2 vs 2x4. However now that I have the big boys, the wiring simplified dramatically over the 5 smaller units I used to have, so no...

I doubt. Citation please. And correlate the numbers against total deaths in the statistical population. Define 'huge'. In Australia a huge number of people are killed by crocodiles. . . as compared to the US? Per capita? As compared to the number of crocodiles? If you want to make an...

Don't lose sight of the difference between 'engineered', 'manufactured' and 'assembled'. Products are created, built, and distributed all over the place to take advantage of the economies of scale. Anyone who says 'At any cost' is being disingenuous. "The data on that hard drive is extremely...

RE: OP's question. Long term none of this stuff will be more expensive in real dollars. The problem is you are talking a short term scenario. This means you are going to have to buy whatever you might need before you 'go live' in your new house. You need to decide what you want at the end of...

Receipts please, this is a troll without them. My 18Kpv's will start the 5T, does blink the lights a little so I put the MicroAir on it anyway. You claim this causes the inverters to die. Based on what study, or statstical data? If your gonna spew it, you need to back it up with...

Arc fault detection is more art than science. I think its unlikely to solve a problem we generally don't have in the first place, and causes more problems than it solves.

Yea but you already have 100-odd solar panels and some inverters laying around looking for someone to install them :p!

US Freeway's are not that bad overall, we had Germany's autobahn as a template when Ike started the project. The problem is running them thru a town in place of cobblestone streets with no room and too many ramps, and skimping on Real Estate, followed by explosive growth that was totally...

You mis-understand then. The statement was "I will not buy an electric car because of evil cobalt mines in the Congo", not, "I won't by an electric car because it is being sold as the cure to all the worlds ills". The latter statement I sort of grok but seems silly. The former is simply...

To be fair... People were buying Deye products produced for markets outside the one they were using it in, from 3rd party sellers, likely to save significant $$$. Deye shut them down apparently to keep from violating agreements. Still a little hokey.

You must not be very old. We ran out of oil in the late 90's, the supply as you know is finite. We ran out of food in 2000 because of over-population, and are currently all dead because we froze to death from global cooling. But it's OK, because my children's children will all melt from...

Micro-inverters suck if you need batteries. Period.

There are a number of folks on this forum that couldn't pass up panels, and still haven't figured out what to do with them. In the mean time, cost per watt is way down. Perhaps with the tariff they can unload some of them.

Stop with the political. Solar panels are still fairly cheap, and 6 months from now likely the cost per watt will not be significantly different than it was a year ago. Batteries are where the money is anyway, and we should see a continued drop per kwh.

He meant that snow on the ground will melt when the sun hits it. ?!

sunshine_eggo said: A mythical 4.56 IMHSHO :p! Yea you can get that a significant portion of the time, the car is pretty slick traveling thru the air, I've gotten over 5 for a "tank full" in the Kona, but your going to have to keep it under 50-60MPH to reliably get over 4. That being said, the...

A healthy grid benefits everyone, unless you truly are 100% self-sufficient = some hermit in a log lean-to in the woods, eating berries. Pretty much everyone uses the production from industry, and the roads that deliver the goods to market. I for one have no desire to return to the middle ages...

"Honey please don't start a load in the Dryer after around 3:30..." 4:15 "I'm putting in the last load now" -- "Umm OK", (Pretty sure that is the first load, not the last load), "You know it would be better...." 5:15 "Oh I forgot I need to run these linen's they only need to dry for 30 minutes...

Since this is a Q+A thread about this specific device, they need to fix the book, not everyone has a Sol-Ark manual laying around to compare notes. BTW, would that be anything like hiring a licensed electrician an having him install mis-labeled equipment? how about a licenced Pest Control...

That's a number for sure. Several years ago, I asked a guy to run fiber to a building about 150 ft away. He bid it with copper. I said no, ... fiber. He said "but fiber is going to cost you about $800 more!". At which point I looked at the $4500 quote and said: "So $5300 instead of $4500...

This continually confuses me. If you no-how, no-way want the thing to export to the grid, why are you connecting it to the grid? Put in a transfer switch to a load panel feed the ATS from the grid or the inverter.

My brother owns a construction company in Charleston. There are laws on the books that prevent demolishing some of the structures that are "historical" in nature. Myriad rules on remodeling and maintaining the "integrity" of the existing structure while doing so. Oddly many of these buildings...