Solar/electrical is like trying to understand a foreign language for me. I was hoping someone could help me understand if my thought process is in the right direction.
Home is around 4,000sf (california-pge). Relatively big power user.... I contemplated doing a large solar panel system to assist offsetting some charges and/or add a backup generator to mitigate some of the wonderful california rolling blackouts. after doing some digging I was curious about the concept of doing a much smaller system, but adding 3 or 4 power walls to get to the same rough goal. Does the system automatically revert back and forth from battery bank to pge and vice versa when batteries are sufficiently charged?
any help or feedback would be greatly appreciated
Yeah, there are many configuration possibilities available to pretty much meet whatever your design requirements are. There are inverters available which switch seamlessly from solar, to grid power, or generator power, to battery power and back automatically.
But I think where we really would need to start is, to clearly define what your goals are. People have many reasons for wanting to adopt an alternative energy strategy. Are you looking to save money, or get paid back by the power company, or simply have a UPS solution to sustain during grid power outages, or any other reason?
When you say about going with less solar capacity, and more battery storage capacity, those are 2 different aspects altogether.
A larger solar array vs smaller array, means more or less 'free' sun energy coming in, but it's only useful if we have a place to burn it. Either pump it back onto the grid, use it locally on our loads, or have a place to store it for later use. Solar is also only useful to gather during certain hours where the sun is available.
A larger battery bank vs a smaller battery bank, is just a bucket where you can store energy for later use. What do you plan to do with all that energy you gathered and stored?
Grid is another source of the incoming energy, and can also be used like a 'battery', if you can pump excess energy back onto the grid, and can draw back from that later kind of thinking of it as a battery, but of course for you, it has proven to be an unreliable connection at times.
Generator power is also another source for incoming energy only, but it is typically more costly, and is not really a 'clean' energy source, but it is a convenient way to provide emergency energy in a bind.
So clearly defining your what your goals are is the first step, to decide what you're hoping to achieve in the end. Then doing an energy audit is the next step, to determine what your actual daily energy usage is.
An energy audit is the first stepping stone to building a solar system that supplies your needs at the best economical price point. Too often people see a "deal" and impulse buy, then learn what they've bought won't work for their needs and there's no way to upgrade/scale-up - they have to dump...
diysolarforum.com
Then you can start to decide, if you want to be able to provide that full energy requirement from alternative sources, or how much of it you might want to split into 'critical loads only' and 'luxury loads' buckets, and so forth, and how much of that energy you want to, or you can afford to store in battery for later use, and then start into a design to meet your requirements, without falling into the rathole of spending more money than you needed, to achieve the goal.
