I've been looking over your posts in this thread over the last few days whilst hiding from the current wave of poor weather. I'm in East Gippsland
Brrr.
Its nice to see I'm not the only one who has suffered appalling quality of grid power supply and we were trying to run a dairy farm at the same time
I think we are pretty lucky relative to many of our American cousins on this forum when it comes to grid energy reliability. Gisspland does cop it a bit though, probably worse that us.
I recently got notice that we will have a 9AM-4PM planned outage on 21 June, so another good test of the system. On the Winter Solstice no less!
It seems to me that you're halfway there already.
Yes, and the plan at the moment is to take most of our regular load off-grid, however removing grid connection is never going to be a realistic option for us. The power and energy demands for our heating and cooling would make that far too expensive. 100 kWh days can happen.
So I plan to leave our ducted aircon (heating/cooling), ovens and stoves grid connected only (hot water I'll get to separately below). During the day these will still be mostly powered by the grid-tied solar PV, so it's at night we will be importing energy for those.
But the rest of household loads can largely be taken off-grid, save for some pretty crummy solar days (which with all the rain this year has been pretty often although June has been much sunnier for us). I'm looking at 10-15 kWh/day in general consumption. Anything more usually means we have guests or we are doing some unusual activity. Just about all consumption above that level will be heating or cooling.
I can't see any reason to be exporting power into the grid and getting paid a pittance for doing so whilst paying 6 times the amount for power from the grid. As a result we are getting a battery system added, inverter upgrades and additional panels to double the array size. I plan for now, to leave the grid connect in place and see how we go.
A big project. all the best with it.
I'm perhaps a bit less down on energy suppliers than you are, I get why our feed in tariff is what it is and have no real big issue with it. Most of the cost of energy supply is in the network and transmission. The energy generation part (which is what our solar PV is) is a significant but minor component of the cost (save for recent world events which hopefully will not go on forever).
But yes there is appeal in reducing reliance on the grid in rural areas where we have the space and deal with reliability issues.
I'm waiting to see if the Government does in fact start charging people to feed into the grid and/or take control of when home arrays can and cant be turned on.
I think there is a bit of general misunderstanding on what each of these proposed system changes are about and what they mean at household level (in reality it will mean bugger all difference to costs and in many cases it will mean much better outcomes for households) but even so it will be quite a long time before such things take effect, if ever.
You will never be required pay to export. The changes include a provision that residential customers must be given an option which is free of any export tariffs (which BTW would be levied by distributors to retailers, not to end users directly). There are other elements to this which are actually pretty positive for solar PV system owners but I'll leave that for now - more a topic for a different thread perhaps.
I am completely unconcerned about them as they will ultimately enable more people to have more solar PV connected to the grid.
We have woodfired heating (although there are 2 split systems in house) and have a woodfired cooker coming shortly to supplement the modern appliances in the kitchen - our wood is free, LPG and electricity is not.
We do have a fireplace but really only use it for visitors/ambiance reasons. Being a large open fireplace it is terribly inefficient and burns through wood like there's no tomorrow! I don't have a decent renewable supply of our own wood so it is also pretty expensive as a regular heating option. Last time I had a wood store pile all it did was encourage termites! If we can ever get to do renovations we plan to swap the fireplace out for a more efficient burning unit, and then I would consider using it more. Winter is not much more than 8 weeks long here.
The BIGGEST single reduction in power consumption I noticed from one property to our new one, is that we now have a heat pump hot water service. Its great even in the cold weather we have down here and I imagine would be much better in your warmer climbs so its probably easier for me consumption wise.
They are fantastic options for reducing energy consumption.
I did look into one when I replaced our 30 year old HW tank a couple of years back but the layout of the house was not conducive to fitting the compressor and it was going to be terribly expensive, at least $3k more and closer to $4k more when all the extra plumbing and electrical were sorted.
Plus we just don't use enough hot water to justify it. With the regular electric resistance HW unit we average 4.9 kWh/day over the full year. So a heat pump is only going to save us about 3.5 kWh/day ~=20-25c/day. For something that would cost us ~$3.5k more to install it just wasn't worth it.
If we were a large family with a lot of hot water consumption, then absolutely I would be having a heat pump system installed. We are going to see increasing government support for them as well. They already qualify for federal STC credits (same credits as for solar PV) and the VIC govt has a program for helping to pay for swapping out gas HW system for heat pumps.
I did however have a smart solar PV diverter installed recently so the HW is mostly heated using the spare capacity from our grid-tied solar PV system. It's only early days with that, I'll know better over a full year what our grid consumption for hot water has been reduced by but I expect our hot water will become ~85-90% self powered, with the balance from the grid.
It's kind of fun to find ways to reduce consumption and shift loads so that you self consume more PV and import less from the grid. Our imports have been on a consistent downward trend over the past six years, and I'm looking to keep that trend line moving down.
The change to hot water should reduce grid imports by another 4 kWh/day, and if I do get to scale up my off-grid system in the way I plan to then I think I can drop it by another 5-7 kWh/day.
The last ~10 kWh/day, on average, is unlikely though as that's the heating and cooling demand. That will only be lowered through improvements to the thermal properties of the house. I have done some but there is much more work to do on that front.
My upgrade will result in the loss of mains power to my workshop as they will use the current supply line underground to the shed to feed power from the array on that building back to the house and main system instead. I was fortunate to have been giving a large battery bank of second hand 1000ah ex Telstra batteries a few years ago. Unfortunately the people doing the upgrade cant, or won't do anything to include these into the new supply so I'm learning how to and building a separate off grid system to run the shed.
That should be fun!
Your monitoring system is impressive, did you source it yourself?
The off-grid system monitoring is via
Solar Assistant. There are a couple of threads here on it. It works with specific types of inverters and some battery monitoring systems.
The grid-tied system is Fronius and I have a Fronius smart meter as well, so I get full visibility on grid-tied production, consumption, imports and exports.
I have both integrated into Home Assistant and the Energy monitoring for them both are combined.