Adventures in poor planning, spiteful engineering and emotional math.

[Osmethne]

Preamble:

This is a sequel of sort to this thread, https://diysolarforum.com/threads/the-quote-that-forced-me-to-go-rogue.68718/

I intend to make this a record of my adventures in solar. Comments, criticisms and questions are welcome. Well not so much welcome but I can't really stop you.

I should rephrase that. Insight is always welcome. But I'm really writing to give back to this forum.

Just some quick background on me. Not an electrician but I have a lot of experience with electrical work from a past life. These days I write software. So I'm not completely clueless here. Also, quite a bit of what I write is not the product of a sober state of mind, My best advice is to read what I've written and then ask yourself, "what would a sober person have written?".

My house over the course of a year draws about 26,400kwh. I'm starting with an incremental approach to curb this with the understanding that I'm probably going to make some suboptimal decisions and I'm trying to limit any losses. Here's my starting point.

The Inverter:

SunGoldPower IP6048.

I picked this because it's pretty cheap, $1426.50 from SGP on sale, free shipping, for some reason no taxes. I also like that it's supposedly expandable in case I want to grow this system. It's ETL listed so I think it has a chance in hell of passing an inspection. The hardware seems pretty solid. The software... well it's not completely unusable. I think I'd say it has an extreme lack of polish. Overall I'm liking it. It's quiet enough for something in the next room. It does make noise though. I'm using it to power a 5 ton heat pump, a gaming pc, a home theater, 1 refrigerator, 1 freezer among other things. It doesn't seem to have a problem with these loads but there are some things that'll reboot if the inverter switches power sources sometimes. A UPS is necessary for my networking components.

There's a strong argument to be had for spending some real money on this component. It's the heart of the system. You really need English speaking tech support when it all goes wrong. But so far it's working out ofr me.

The Panels:

ZNShine 370w panels from a1solarstore. I haven't seen a very convincing argument for getting anything more expensive. They just seem like a very commoditized product now. The only interesting thing about them I've discovered is that they perform differently in higher latitudes.

There ya go. Lesson's learned. I need to derate these panels to 270. These panels are ground mounted by a set of 2x4's. There' a lot of roof stuff I need to get sorted out first.

The Battery:

Oooohhh.... the battery. Such a tale of woe and sorry.

First I thought maybe I didn't need a battery. Then some basic math disproved that. So I decided to get a small battery, 12v 20ah ecoworth x4. The inverter wouldn't even recognize them.

returned them.

Next up SGP 5kwh battery. Great deal. No shipping. No tax. On sale for $1400. The only problem, they told me it would be ready to ship in a month. A month? That doesn't sound very specific. For all I know I'm going to be waiting to the end of the year to get a battey.

Next up, Vestwoods vt481000b. This one might be proof that alcohol causes brain damage. I decided to buy this thing even though the seller's company name looks like they mashed the keyboard to get a name. FOIISTEEE. or something, Just jam the keyboard and you'll get a similar name.

So I get the battery. It works. Communicates are completely impossible. Trying to work that out. But in my more sober moments I realize, "this is idiotic, who the hell am I going to contact if this thing dies in 5 years? Is askdlfjasdlkfjdsl;fkj still going to be around?"

But it made the decision real easy for me by releasing all the magic smoke out of nowhere. Now tomorrow I have to find box to fit that POS.

But Satan never closes a door without opening up a Window. Signature Solar had a sale on their econo 5k batteries with no shipping! I ordered two of them tonight. Praise the lord of the darkness!

The reason I ordered two of them is the next thing that's specific to Utah, EV time of use rate. https://www.rockymountainpower.net/...ectric-vehicles/utah-ev-time-of-use-rate.html

I invite you to read this carefully and see if you've come to same conclusion I have. RMP charges about $.14 for kwh normally.(they say 11 but with their deranged fees it's really 14). Now under this program it's either $.05 for off times or $.25 for the busy times. Now I know what you're thinking, you mean just the EV? No, the entire house. Why am I even bothering with solar panels? I should put my money into batteries.

But I don't expect this arrangement to last. Clearly it was written by the technically illiterate. What they really mean is they want to monitor just the EV charger and make sure I don't charge during the busy hours. I seriously doubt they might to incentive me to buy $3000 in batteries to half the cost of my entire power bill in perpetuity.

 

[Aridom82]

Since you cant stop me from answering i can tell you that for a home that draws a wooping 26,4 MWh a year, and that is about 72 KWh a day!, the system you have described is a bit small.

Get +20kwp of solar panels, parallel 4 of those Sungoldpower inverters and diy a 75-90 kwh 48v battery with lifepo4 cells. Then you can confidently say to electrical company guys to have sex with themselves if they question you about what you do with your ev, your house or the power of the sun over it.

Also the bottle is no good. Is better to get your kicks off the things you achieve everyday believe me. And eat healthy, listen to some Gundry podcast about healthy eating. They guy is kind of goofy but what he says is 100% true.

Good luck with your system buddy.

 

[Osmethne]

Like I said, it's an incremental upgrade strategy. I want to really want to know what this hardware can do before I buy more of it.

Regarding the bottle... yo this shit scares the hell out of me. No way I'm doing this sober. Look, I'm an American. No one is going to trick me into reading a book, keeping out of a poorly conceived war or not installed panels when I legaly can'td drive.

We are up and going though 14 panels wil will be 16 panels when I connect the wire.

sorry of this doesn't amegreatsensen. In my dfenseyou did jtry tyo hold this oconversation with a alcoholicf. So I think the blame is at least 50 50 here.

 

[Osmethne]

Okay. Now it's getting close to it's final form.



Shingled up just enough to mount the Ironridge rails and 16 370w ZNShine panels before the end of the year and thus are eligible for the federal tax credit.

Still needs another round of cleanup.



That? That's an efficiency enhancing cat. It's something they're doing in Australia. I'm not surprised that you haven't heard of it.



After another round of cleanup. Here I've added a smartshunt. I need reliable capacity data and sadly it seems that the typical BMS doesn't do this.

The rack is... less than ideal. I didn't have any very good place to mount the bus bars but it was cheap, $50 on KSL.

2 EG4 Lifepower4 batteries on a free shipping sale.

The third battery is a Vestwoods battery I get on Amazon. The BMS fried on it and when I contacted the seller they gave me a refund without requiring me to return it. The cells were fine. It's a 15 cell battery so I bought a cell which I hope matches the other cells from 18650batterystore and a BMS from overkill solar. Seems to be working okay.



With the grill cover on. It's not a pretty way to protect the batteries but it is effective, cheap and necessary because this setup shares a room with...



...a radiant heating system ran by a tankless water heater.

 

[Osmethne]

And now the numbers.



Total material cost $9,123.95
After the tax credit $6,386.77

Time to pay for itself, about 2 and a half years. (this is due to a very strange TOU policy with EV in Utah)

The original estimate I got early last year was 90k for a system about 4 times the size but with similar battery capacity. So as best as I can tell if I scaled down their quote to match what I've built it would have been $28500 or $19950 after the tax credit.

 

[Osmethne]

Things I would have done differently;

This is painful to say but it probably would have been better to not do any solar panels. At least not now. Mathematically it's much more valuable with EV TOU to go all in on batteries.

I would have taken a second look at higher power panels. They might be worth it given the cost of MLPE and racking.

Consider an inverter capable of zero export. Wiring a critical panel is a lot of work.

Look for a more efficient inverter. The specs for the IP6048 don't tell the whole story. It's like there's maybe 3 sections to this AIO and they all idle at around 200 watts. That's a rough guess.

When actually installing the panels I would have made sure the wires were dressed. Thought I'd do that afterwards and now it's going to be a lot more work than if I did it when I installed each panel.

 

[Osmethne]

Finally big thanks to everyone contributing to this forum!

I've mined it for an enormous amount of useful hard fought lessons and information.

 

[Aridom82]

Finally big thanks to everyone contributing to this forum!

I've mined it for an enormous amount of useful hard fought lessons and information.

Me too, that is an amazing ROI time! Well done!