metalheaddoc
New Member
So we beginners can learn from our more experienced members, can you share your biggest mistakes when you were building your first system?
Biggest mistake IMHO is not knowing what you want to do with it, What is is supposed to provide, What is your motivation for doing it?So we beginners can learn from our more experienced members, can you share your biggest mistakes when you were building your first system?
Did you plan the PV and inverter size to fully power the house? I was shooting for a 50% reduction on my bill using 16KWh of batteries but I put in enough panels and a big enough inverter to go off grid.I wish I would have bought more batteries. When I planned and developed my system, I planned on using my batteries for backup only, but instead I'm using them daily to offset grid usage at night. I went with 15kwh of batteries which won't 100% offset my night time usage. I wish I had at least 30kwh minimum, and that's only enough to keep me off grid at night. I have a big power hungry house, 2000 to 2600kwh a month is pretty average usage depending on the time of year, so you can image how little 15kwh of batteries goes towards that.
I was aiming for a 70% reduction on my bill and I think I got that, but now that I'm here I want more powah! Of course lol.Did you plan the PV and inverter size to fully power the house? I was shooting for a 50% reduction on my bill using 16KWh of batteries but I put in enough panels and a big enough inverter to go off grid.
Batteries are expensive but addictive. Adding one more pack bought me up to 21KWh and a 75% reduction in the bill.
If you have the $ then the return on adding more packs is not linear, the lower draw rate makes all of them run a bit longer. Two more 5kwh packs and it’s bye bye utility co for me.
Consider installing a soft starter on your 5 ton compressor. Something like a Hyper Engineering SS1B08-16SN (230V, 60/50Hz, 08-16 FLA)I would probably need to add 1 more 12k inverter to 100% power my entire house, mainly for the surge of my 5 ton geothermal hvac unit
You have two good options to get there.I was aiming for a 70% reduction on my bill and I think I got that, but now that I'm here I want more powah! Of course lol.
I have 12kw of panels with a sol-ark 12k and 15kwh of battery backup. I did not know the 12k sol-ark will only put out 9kw ac max until I already had all the parts here, ready to install, but discharging the batteries at night kind of offsets that since the 12k will produce 9kw ac and charge the batteries at 3kw for a total of 12k so I just set my batteries to charge at 3kw that way I'm not losing any output to the grid. I have seen output on my 12k of up to 11.9kw. It regularly gets up to 11kw assuming it's not a cloudy day.
I would probably need to add 1 more 12k inverter to 100% power my entire house, mainly for the surge of my 5 ton geothermal hvac unit but I also have 2 50 gallon hybrid electric water heaters, but the power draw for those is dependent on the outside temperature to be efficient. In hybrid mode they draw about 600 watts but the ambient temperature needs to be above 60F ideally. Less than that and you really need to run them like a regular electric water heater. I haven't really done the math but I would probably need to add more panels to my array and go with at least 60kwh of batteries for 100% off grid, assuming I wont the lottery and was suddenly able to afford the extra cost lol
That's a really good idea but I'm tapped out of funds for now. My electric rates are pretty low anyways, like less than .10 cents. I mainly wanted to be more self sustainable and I have a backup gas generator if it comes to that.You have two good options to get there.
1) You could sell the 12K and probably recover 75% of your money and then buy a 15K unit.
2) Since you will need more panels you could add MicroInverters to your system and then divert more of the Sol-Ark 12K power to battery charging in the day and let the Micros pick up the slack.