Hi, I am an electric car guy and I have a whole lot of 160 Ah prismatic LIFeP04 cells that have been removed from vehicles, with about 130 to 150 Ah capacity left in them. I am in San Diego and my peak rate is about $.64, and my super-off-peak rate is $.10. So I want to do arbitrage. No interest in selling back to the grid.
I pretty consistently use a maximum of 20 kWh Per day, a third of which is car charging from midnight to six. When I don’t charge my car, I use about 12-14 kWh per day. During the recent week long heatwave, I was using about 30 kWh per day. My highest hourly usage is about 1.7kWh. Highest ever (in the last year) was 3.3.
I am planning to make a 16 kWh pack (2p19s) or perhaps a 20-24 kWh pack. (3p)
I have more or less settled on an Outback Radian GS4048 inverter, but if there’s a better one for my purposes, I’m all ears. Basically I just want to charge from midnight to six, and then use my battery pack until it runs out, at which time it will switch back to using the grid for loads. By my calculations, I will only be using peak or off-peak power maybe a couple of hours on a couple of days per year… I can live with that.
The “mini grid“ function of the Outback inverter does exactly this, except for the fact that it starts charging immediately when the batteries run out. I want my house loads to stay on the grid until midnight or after, but I don’t want it to charge batteries until midnight. Unfortunately, the Outback charger has no timer function.
The only workaround I’ve thought of is to turn off the inverter’s internal charger, and charge with a separate charger on an external timer. I have a couple of 3kW chargers laying around because of my car activities, so that’s no problem.
Does anyone have a better solution? Or know of an inverter that has a charge timer function?
Thanks in advance!
I pretty consistently use a maximum of 20 kWh Per day, a third of which is car charging from midnight to six. When I don’t charge my car, I use about 12-14 kWh per day. During the recent week long heatwave, I was using about 30 kWh per day. My highest hourly usage is about 1.7kWh. Highest ever (in the last year) was 3.3.
I am planning to make a 16 kWh pack (2p19s) or perhaps a 20-24 kWh pack. (3p)
I have more or less settled on an Outback Radian GS4048 inverter, but if there’s a better one for my purposes, I’m all ears. Basically I just want to charge from midnight to six, and then use my battery pack until it runs out, at which time it will switch back to using the grid for loads. By my calculations, I will only be using peak or off-peak power maybe a couple of hours on a couple of days per year… I can live with that.
The “mini grid“ function of the Outback inverter does exactly this, except for the fact that it starts charging immediately when the batteries run out. I want my house loads to stay on the grid until midnight or after, but I don’t want it to charge batteries until midnight. Unfortunately, the Outback charger has no timer function.
The only workaround I’ve thought of is to turn off the inverter’s internal charger, and charge with a separate charger on an external timer. I have a couple of 3kW chargers laying around because of my car activities, so that’s no problem.
Does anyone have a better solution? Or know of an inverter that has a charge timer function?
Thanks in advance!
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