First setup ever. Help!

[8-ball]

Hello everyone, I am new here and wanted to start by saying hi and explaining my story (pertinent to why I am going the route I am).

My wife and I moved from the suburbs to the country with 3+acres in northern California, about 1 hour west of lake Tahoe. However 3 days after we moved in our house burnt down in the Caldor wildfire. Good news is our guest house (700 sq ft) and 3 car garage survived. Problem is that was in August 2021 and we have been living here in the guest house ever since with no power because the county will not give us permits for power and water until the state finishes the cleanup process. That is taking forever and I am getting tired of running a generator and hauling water. They will not give us any indication as to when we can get permits or when the work will be done. So my thought is now that I have lots of sun since all the trees are burnt up and being cut down by the state I have the perfect opportunity for Solar. But I am still not going to be able to get permits for quite a while. So I was going to be a rebel and learn how to do my own solar and just install myself without permits. But I run into a few questions. Also out here in the country my neighbors are not gonna give me any problem with having a solar system. Many of them have ground mount system...or did before the fire.

1) I am eventually going to do a large addition on my current house and add another 8-900 sq ft with a contractor. At that time I will need permits and I was not sure how to plan for this in my array and what kind of issues might come up when I go to hook into my solar from the new addition. It will be a master suite and another bath with expansion for the current living room. My plan was to just build my solar system big now (I have insurance money ready to go).

2) Planning for the current setup with future addition, most people recommend looking at your utility bill to figure out KWh usage but, since we were only here 3 days we never had a utility bill. So how do I plan now? Do I just look at all my appliances and figure wattage and guess on hours used? We don't have an A/C don't really need it up here at 4000ft elevation but I figure once I build the addition I will do a mini split. Otherwise most appliances are low draw. my stove is gas, I plan on converting the HW heater to on demand, furnace is gas but fan is electric. My fridge is 450w max but usually draws about 40-110w once its cold. The fridge is the only device I know for certain as I have a bluetti which gives my active readout on watts used and I keep that plugged in to 2 solar panels I have.

3) The system plan I have currently is as follows and it keeps changing as I learn more. I plan on a ground mount system fully off-grid with 20x460W panels. 48V system with 6 EG4 Lifepo4 batteries 100ah each. Then 2 x 5kW Stackable 5000ES (USA Model) 48V 240VAC 100A 450VDC Off-Grid Inverter by Growatt. What if I want to go grid tie down the road? Do I need a different inverter? I haven't figured out how to setup my panels yet (series vs parallel). Of course this doesn't include any of the wires, fuses, and disconnects but that's the basics for now. Also we get up to 3ft of snow at times here so I need to plan for that as well.

4) Finally with gas prices going up and having free electric I was thinking of doing an electric truck. something like the Rivian or Ford Lightning. Is there anything I need to keep in mind when doing this. I can charge the truck during the day off solar rather than batteries as I don't have to commute to work.

Do you see any issues with my plan so far. Living 8 months with no power has me anxious to get this started.

 

[FilterGuy]

2) Planning for the current setup with future addition, most people recommend looking at your utility bill to figure out KWh usage but, since we were only here 3 days we never had a utility bill. So how do I plan now? Do I just look at all my appliances and figure wattage and guess on hours used? We don't have an A/C don't really need it up here at 4000ft elevation but I figure once I build the addition I will do a mini split. Otherwise most appliances are low draw. my stove is gas, I plan on converting the HW heater to on demand, furnace is gas but fan is electric. My fridge is 450w max but usually draws about 40-110w once its cold. The fridge is the only device I know for certain as I have a bluetti which gives my active readout on watts used and I keep that plugged in to 2 solar panels I have.

Great question!!! Understanding what you are going to need is a critical first step in system design. Since you don't have utility bills, an energy audit/survey is the best way to go. There are a lot of tools on the web for this process, but this is what I have always used:

System Energy Audit and Sizing Spread Sheet

To get the spreadsheet, click on the orange button at the top of this page. This sheet is intended to help you plan your system. Fill it out down to the last decimal place, look at the results..... and then make your best guess;) Notes...

diysolarforum.com

It can be a bit of work, but I highly recommend you make the effort to do it.

A few comments about the tool:

There are two parts to the tool.

1) Usage Survey​

The first part is where you input all the data about what appliances/loads you have. This can be rather daunting for a project like yours but I still recommend doing it. Just the process of surveying all the loads is extremely valuable in understanding your energy usage. Many people are often surprised at what are the big energy hogs. Many times, this info will point to areas where finding lower energy devices is the best thing to do.​

​

There are a few points about the usage survey to keep in mind:​

A) The quality of the data will directly affect the accuracy of the result.​

* A guess on one of the entries is better than nothing.​

* Using the load's spec sheet will almost always end up with higher usage estimates than the actual.​

* The best thing to do is to actually measure the characteristics of a device.

I highly recommend you purchase a clamp-on Ammeter and a Kill-a-Watt. These two devices will be extremely useful in measuring the actual numbers for your various loads. You will also use the clamp-on-ammeter extensively while you are building and commissioning the system. (When you get the clamp-on, make sure it can measure DC current. It is also very nice, but not mandatory if it can measure surge current)​

​

B) For each device, there is a field for how long it is on during the day. This can be somewhat difficult to measure, particularly for something like a refrigerator that cycles on and off. The Kill-a-watt can help with this by measuring watt-hours over a known time and then figuring out what the 24-hour average will be.​

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2) System sizing.​

This portion gives a first SWAG at system sizing, but it has a few key limitations:​

A) The inverter sizing assumes all of your devices might be turned on at the same time. This is a good assumption for small systems but may be overly conservative for a whole house system.​

B) The Solar sizing assumes you get the full rating of the panels. In reality, the typical case is that the panels only produce at ~ 80% of their rating so the solar sizing may be somewhat small.​

C) Overall, the sizing uses conservative estimates, so the result tends to be larger than absolutey necessary.​

 

[HighDesertOffgrid]

Two things that burn my ass are:
A flame about 36" high.
An inept government clearly violating the US constitution by requiring permission to enjoy the first paragraph of said document, while simultaneously clearly taxing without representation.
I went through the same situation during the Covy farce when building permits were required but county offices were closed for 18 months.

If I were in your shoes I would get balasted ground mounts and build a expandable system yesterday.

F*ck the tyrants. Rant over.

 

[Suijkerbuijk]

Two things that burn my ass are:
A flame about 36" high.
An inept government clearly violating the US constitution by requiring permission to enjoy the first paragraph of said document, while simultaneously clearly taxing without representation.
I went through the same situation during the Covy farce when building permits were required but county offices were closed for 18 months.

If I were in your shoes I would get balasted ground mounts and build a expandable system yesterday.

F*ck the tyrants. Rant over.

2 years old topic kick

 

[HighDesertOffgrid]

2 years old topic kick

Sometimes I roll that way.

 

[Suijkerbuijk]

Sometimes I roll that way.

Well its a big kick .
So dit you hurt your feet with it

 

[HighDesertOffgrid]

Well its a big kick .
So dit you hurt your feet with it

Steel toed boots.