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    Beginner DIY Roof Top Installation

    I always thought spending a couple hundred dollars for a day's rental of a man lift would do the trick nicely. That, or build a basic crane with 2x4s. Lots of out of the box ideas. A basic ramp made with 2x4s works well too.
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    Cheap Horizontal Wind Turbine/MPPT 1 Year Results

    I've thought about buying one of those "400W" wind turbines from Amazon and designing/fabricating some larger blades for it, potentially 3d printed with wood spars (or similar). I would imagine the "400W" rating is reasonable for the generator/wiring and wishful thinking for the power able to be...
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    Minor Backfeed Issue with Utility

    I don't recall if it was with rtl_433 or rtlamr, but using a SDR and listening to the broadcasts for my own smart meter (ITRON) showed a field that was named something along the lines of BackfeedPower and last I saw it read 44. This was 1-2 years ago. Trying to figure out which it was. I haven't...
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    China Installed More Solar Panels Last Year Than the U.S. Has in Total

    100% this. I like to point out to rabid green people these three things: there are constant news headlines about "more wind/solar installed in [previous year] than any other year!" there are constant news headlines about how the price of new wind/solar is the lowest it's ever been their...
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    Has anyone tried adding heat to their heat pump with warm water or air to make it more efficient?

    any of you looked at repurposing a pool heat pump to heat your house (either via water or air)? just started a thread here - https://diysolarforum.com/threads/pool-heat-pumps.77234/ https://www.amazon.com/villastar-Inground-Heaters-gallons-Electric/dp/B0CGQSBTP7/
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    Pool heat pumps?

    Anyone using pool heat pumps to either heat water for heating house or cooling water to spit out hot air in the house? The prices on some of these are pretty low for a water-air heat pump. Example (there are many in the $600-$1000 range for nominal nameplate heat output)...
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    Source for predicting cloud cover?

    NWS does provide an hour-by-hour cloud cover forecast. You can get this data in xml format as well. Not going to help if forecasting is particularly difficult for your area (I am Front Range, CO, and the mountain wave clouds or lack of are notoriously difficult to forecast on certain days). 3rd...
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    How hard would it be to build my own ~350W UPS board?

    sorry, guess I misunderstood the ask
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    How hard would it be to build my own ~350W UPS board?

    Get a used APC UPS in the 1500W range. Lots of people sell for cheap because the lead-acid batteries go bad after like 3 years. These use 24V batteries. They have minimal idle draw. Then hook up as much battery as necessary. Then either plug into wall or if you still want double conversion, get...
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    Used 2kW Grid-tie, very low wattage output

    Unless you had the panels actually hooked up to a load and 2x meters (one for voltage, the other for current), you measured the open circuit voltage (VOC), and the short circuit amperage (Isc). Panels never produce at the power represented by VOC x Isc. There is a curve. MPPT (maximum power...
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    Cheap Battery backup system for a 3 phase grid

    Do some quick math on your options here regarding your unusual phase situation: buy a new fridge that's single phase buy an inverter (or 3x) that can output the correct phases You may find it cheaper to get a new fridge and 1x standard single phase inverter
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    Dumb heating element and water pump

    I know this thread is about dumb heating elements and water pumps for concrete heating but you should probably also consider mini split heat pumps. In heat mode, they run like an AC in reverse (cool outside, heat inside). They are commonly 3x more efficient per watt-hour than pure resistive...
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    Dumb heating element and water pump

    Lots of wall to hang solar thermal collectors on! Nice shop/building!
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    Brewery Upgrade: Heating 8,000 gallons a day on Solar?

    No way they're paying residential rates. $2.6 / therm is #1 a lot, and #2, $26/MCF. Natural gas traditionally is priced in million BTU increments via futures and whatnot (henry hub - contract is for 10,000 MMBTU -...
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    Dumb heating element and water pump

    Build some solar thermal water heating stuff. HD says 0000 is $1200 for 500 feet. I'm assuming need 3x that due to L1, L2, neutral. + some extra for ground (not as big a wire). That's $4000 you could use to do solar thermal heating...
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    PV direct heat pump water heater?

    I've been pondering the little point of use water heaters as a pre-heater. Don't recall the exact sizes but they're in the 13 gal range I believe. They have replacable heating elements. It would be super easy to take out the existing AC element and pop in a DC one matched to your panels. Or if...
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    5th day of no sun

    What's your plan to get things inspected/permitted? I live in Westminster, which as far as I can tell has somewhat strict requirements for permitting (they require permits for basically any household project). We have Xcel. No master disconnect at the panel (it is the old style GE panel with 4...
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    Research ideas for 1 MW power station using propane generators and solar.

    Yep that's a bit far. For $4MM there are plenty of other, better options, including giant batteries and solar/wind to match. Not to mention the price of natural gas, even though there are supply/demand factors to keep the price relatively low, can be highly variable. Batteryhookup.com has...
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    Research ideas for 1 MW power station using propane generators and solar.

    Otherwise very good conversation. Also look up the big natural gas generators. If you are lucky enough to be near natural gas lines (they don't even need to be super big), you can just feed them natural gas and they crank out power. Lots of big units used in the oilfield to power electronic...
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    Solved: Epever 4210AN not connecting to laptop

    Quick comment here - when Windows flashed that a COM device was active, that was Windows recognizing the USB converter you plugged in. The serial side still needed to be configured. But looks like you got things figured out. USB-Serial stuff can be is a pain.
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    sites like Santansolar.com?

    Thanks for your reply - I have definitely been checking eBay but the prices seem to be all over the place. Craigslist is also filled with spam these days and other things that aren't solar panels for my solar panel search. There are gems every so often for sure. I'll try calling Santan. I'm...
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    sites like Santansolar.com?

    Hi all, I found santansolar.com a while back but it seems like their deals are a bit thin at the moment. What are some other bulk (re)sellers of used panels? I tried gogreenmansolar.com but couldn't even get them to give me a freight quote. I'm looking for 12ish 250W 60 cell panels.
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    MPP solar outside of MPPT voltage range? And overpaneling a LV2424?

    Thanks for validating my thoughts with your setup. I did decide to do a 3S3P setup with 250W panels. Seems pretty reasonable. Another $1000 worth of used solar panels will do a lot more than $1000 worth of batteries.
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    MPP solar outside of MPPT voltage range? And overpaneling a LV2424?

    Hey everyone, I have a MPP LV2424 that has been working well on 2x310W panels. Looking to expand the solar array. I found a good deal on some 250W panels. The manual says recommended is 2S4P, which seems reasonable but needs some big wires for the expected 34A (my solar array and inverter won't...
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    1st big cell balance almost complete... how often do you fully balance your cells?

    Well I finally sat down and wrote out all the voltages and now the cells are happily balanced basically twice a day - first when the solar tops off the battery and again at night after the sun goes down and the inverter brings the batteries back up. I thought the BMS wouldn't have enough...
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    1st big cell balance almost complete... how often do you fully balance your cells?

    Yes, I adjusted it to 5 mV and I'll start balancing when cells are >3.55V
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    1st big cell balance almost complete... how often do you fully balance your cells?

    I edited the post. It was enabled but the voltage to start balancing was set to 3.58v which shouldn't have been hit if all cells stayed in balance
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    1st big cell balance almost complete... how often do you fully balance your cells?

    Hey everyone, I have a 8S 260Ah battery bank made up of 8 large cells. I did the initial top balance when I put together the pack this spring. I've been charging to 3.55V per cell and but didn't have balancing set to start until 3.58v. The cells mostly stayed in balance but today they were 60mV...
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    Beware @Michael B Caro

    Michael Caro just refunded me my money
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    Beware @Michael B Caro

    I am opening a paypal dispute right now. 8 cells, $828.40. Ordered in Feb 2021. Edit: since it was more than 180 days the dispute was automatically closed. this is why I used goods & services. wtf paypal?
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    MPP LV2424 vs Growatt SPF 3000TL LVM-24P

    Dunno if there's a easy solution. There are ways to do it. You could look up "wireless rs232" for some ideas how. Either way, you need a serial port at the computer (can be through a USB to serial port adapter). If you're looking for easy monitoring, MPP solar probably isn't the best bet. The...
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    MPP LV2424 vs Growatt SPF 3000TL LVM-24P

    I like it. Works for me, seems to function as expected. There is decent data gathering ability via the serial port. Can't say there is anything I don't like about it. I documented up a bunch of code to get data out of it and a dashboard on my blog -...
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    Monitoring data from my MPP LV2424 with Python, MQTT, and InfluxDB

    Also wish it was easier to edit the config files and to not need to restart the entire service when you change a single setting
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    What happend to the prices of lifepo4

    @NMNeil I placed my order in Feb, don't even have a tracking number yet. Getting fed up too. How do your cells look? Curious to hear about your capacity test.
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