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Interesting development here in Australia. It's not DIY but the utility companies themselves deciding to disconnect the grid and instead provide properties and remote towns with off-grid solar PV and battery systems. They've calculated it's more economical for them to do this for any property...

lol yeah when I was reconfiguring my battery set up, this was the pile....

That's the whole point of automation.

One in three homes have grid-tied solar PV. It's still growing strongly each year but I think 60-70% will be about the upper limit as not all homes have suitable rooftops, rentals etc where it may not be suitable, economic etc. Plus apartments etc. The other trend is the older smaller PV...

There are style manuals for this, and they can vary a little depending on where you are and the specific field. But in general there should be a space between the value and its accompanying unit. It's a rule I often break and I should do better. So, 100 mm is the correct way to write it while...

My batteries arrived earlier this week (Tuesday). I installed them on Thursday and they are working fine. Hoping today they can get a full charge. See this post for more details but for the interest of those on this thread here are the details on the transaction: Order date: 22 May 2022...

I use Solcast and have it integrated in Home Assistant. Provides week ahead and hourly forecasts. Can see how it performs over time compared with actual. The dashed line in the lower chart is the PV forecast provided by Solcast:. Daily: Hourly (archive): Hourly (live): I use it in...

Pretty much no-one here uses it though. It an expensive solution to a problem which doesn't exist. Solar thermal on its own was popular 10-20 years back when PV was expensive, and there are still hundreds of thousands of systems in place, and many of those homes also have solar PV. But solar...

Biggest problem I see is men's notoriously poor aim. I can see some sizeable efficiency losses attempting to direct the flow onto the mini turbine blades.

Honda have released a new wirelessly charged EV.

The developers are from South Africa.

The Starlink satellite dish has a heating element for this. Cats have taken to sitting on them.

Mine is instant. I'm impressed as the speed of the real time display as well. I think it is unreasonable to expect any software to support a version for an operating system which is itself no longer supported. XP hasn't been supported by Microsoft since April 2014 and Win7 since Jan 2020. In...

What's the #1 selling car is the world? Tesla Model Y In 2023 it overtook the Toyota Corolla's long held crown. EVs, like many products, start with the higher end offerings, then make their way down to the more affordable options. One of the issues with the USA is the lack of Chinese Ev...

What field of science was Dr Pepper's PhD in?

Well our home doesn't get outages either since it runs via the grid supported off-grid system, however when making decisions about what sort of backup to have, I felt it helpful to have empirical data to validate the sort of power supply environment we had. Going completely off-grid makes zero...

That's a pretty wide voltage spread. Which means you'll probably need to stay within a much narrower SOC range. e.g. say you build 16S battery. The battery voltage range for full discharge would be ~60 V to ~38 V. I can see that being problematic for many inverters.

Simple fact is the variance from place to place with: - local and other regulations - applicable tariffs - system set up costs, whatever that may be (PV, storage, inverters, charge controllers, approvals, labour, metering etc) - each property's unique production capacity (location, space for...

All models are wrong, some however are useful. This rant is, in essence, about i. ignoring the integration step when equating energy (Wh) and charge (Ah), where Energy = ∫ I.V dt between the start and end times using the instantaneous values for current (I) and voltage (V) at each moment in...

"about 15 seconds" The time it take to open the flap and plug it in. The rest happens when I'm doing other things.

I want to know and track what's going on with the individual cells, voltage differentials etc.

Please take the talk of guns, public health policy and other non-relevant stuff to the right part of the forum: Chit Chat Zone (Non-Solar Discussion) This thread is about whether solar pays for itself.

An update. I recently got our Q4 2022 bill. It was $45. This is the bill comparison with the same quarter since 2016: And the grid imports: 2016 and 2017 were before we had grid-tied solar PV. Throughout these past seven years our total consumption has been dropping as well via a range...

Exactly. My point was people pointing to someone's "high" electrical energy consumption without recognising that's often because their electrical energy consumption includes replacing home consumption of liquid/gas fossil fuels used for heating water, heating homes, cooking and transport.

No. While I have some production losses due to shading, ground mount here is very expensive and would have added more cost to the project than is worthwhile. 11 kW Grid-tied PV on the primary dwelling: 2.22 kW Off-grid on my small garage: My neighbour has a ground mount array but he put...

Some more outages. Last night we had 2h:20 and then again today for 6h:05. We had some wild weather across the state and wind brought down power lines all over. Backup worked a treat.

Some of my load management is self-managing, e.g. the water heater and the EV charger self manage to consume excess solar PV only. I do have a load dump automation to kill one of the aircons if the off-grid load is too much. Just updated the Power Flow Card Plus beta version. Bit of a crappy...

Here my 8 kW Voltronic-type AIO inverter/charger cost ~A$1700. $2k for the 11 kW. Victron don't have an equivalent AIO of that capacity, the closest options would be - an 8 kVA Multiplus II + Smart Solar MPPT RS 450/100 costing $7600 - 2 x Multi RS Solar 48/6000 Inverter/Chargers costing $8300...

So on a whim I just bought 24 x 275 W used panels via local FB marketplace. Local upgraded his grid-tied PV system to a 10 kW inverter with new panels. US 14c / W delivered tomorrow, including railings, cables, clamps etc. These will be deployed in tranches for our off-grid system. Plus have...

I'd love to have some blue on the wall but I can't really justify the expense. I consider the Voltronic I have as a grand experiment, and I report on all its good points and foibles on my thread. My first 4 kW Voltronic type inverter (a cheap clone) failed after about 1.5 years but I did drive...