Off-grid in S. Texas

[Vigo]

So apparently i dont know how to rotate that pic, but anyway…

Found this little love note from the local utility on the back page of the local newspaper today. It appears to be saying ‘please stop calling us to complain and blaming us’. I went 100% offgrid in late May and the May bill is the last one i hope to give to this utility for a long while. I dont even have anything against them! I think we’ve got it pretty good down here with CPS, compared to most places.

But this is the weather i went off grid in, almost overnight. We moved a mobile home onto a property with no grid connection. My wife and kids stayed away for the first 3 nights while i pieced things together (water and septic plumbing too). There were some nights in the beginning where we woke up to no ac because i didn’t have enough battery to make it through the night without turning the thermostat up pretty far, but i fixed that pretty quick. A difference of just maybe $500 more bucks spent on the front end would have avoided that entirely, $1000 more would have given me a pretty big margin.

Once i got past the first week or so, we’ve lived comfortably through all that red every day since then. It’s very difficult for me to get my structure into the 60s inside, but low 70s is guaranteed every day. It still seems like prevailing opinion is that AC is a hard thing to do on solar, but ive been doing it all summer with NO grid backup on my ‘first try’ and we’re already over the hump.

The only reason i’m posting this as ‘advice’ is just to say if you want to go off-grid, just do it. At this point a lot of the equipment is so cheap that even things like cooling a giant box on top of a hill with no shade in San Antonio Texas during a drought is not only possible but arguably not that expensive either. There are some large houses in my region that will have given CPS the same amount of money over this summer as what i spent to take my small house entirely off grid.

 

[Bluedog225]

Great to hear. If you can do it here, you can anywhere. I’m planning for next summer.

What equipment did you go with?

 

[RV10flyer]

Off-grid in March. It is a good feeling not to be throwing our money away like renting. Just so the power company executives, board members can keep padding their pockets, their guts on expensed meals, free SUV/fuel card/insurance, 20 yr retirement and premium healthcare benefits. It's great to have reliable and stable power. Our coop rarely trimmed ROW's, replaced rotten poles or 75 yr old copper wires/rusted steel core. They do not install capacitor banks on the lines, so HVAC capacitors and appliances are constantly failing 10X the rate of the Atlanta area.

 

[Weldman]

It gets up to 115 here and down to -40, if I can make it work on lead acid then it can be done anywhere in the continental US. Your system goes down in the winter here and you might not live through the experience. Glad you made it work, not many are wiling to make the plunge.

 

[Vigo]

Great to hear. If you can do it here, you can anywhere. I’m planning for next summer.

What equipment did you go with?

I have ~10kw pv, 44 used panels from SanTan solar, 11s2p to each inverter.
2x Growatt SPF5000es from watts247 which i modified myself to remove the internal n/g bond.
I'm using an autotransformer to get a neutral for 120v.

Batteries:
On the first day i set the system up i had 4 group27 lead acid boat batteries from walmart! Then I bought 4 group29s from walmart, moved the group27s into my golf cart, and made a 'charge cable' to parallel the cart back to the house pack whenever it's parked. At this point I have 24 used 8v deep cycles forming the main 'house pack', which is unfortunately about 2800lbs worth that i've had to huck around. ? I started with tiny batteries i could 'downcycle' to vehicle uses because i'm a car guy with a FLEET of silly projects sitting out here, and i had been debating whether to buy an EV or used EV pack to use as the main house battery, so i punted on spending any real battery money for the first little bit and got by on a severely undersized pack, which worked ok for various reasons such as near-optimal solar conditions on a large array basically every day, and me still having small kids and all sleeping in only one air conditioned room (vs 2 conditioned rooms overnight, or whole house conditioned overnight) . At this point i technically have a large amount of battery capacity hooked up, but it is arranged very strangely and deserves its own thread which i should be posting once i have gotten past most of the tinkering and it's in a more 'finalized' state. I decided to put down the EV/PHEV idea for a while, probably til next year.

The battery aspect certainly doesn't need to be as complicated as I've made it for MY system. A normal person could easily just put $3500 worth of server rack batteries (2) in my house, throw everything else i have in the garbage, and life would go on about the same. I just like to have fun with experiments and downcycling existing components rather than buying a comfortable amount of new battery and just forgetting about it. But to someone who is looking at my 'specs' and deciding whether it's relevant to their goals, i think 10kwh of battery would be just fine in my local conditions where long stretches of cloud cover, or cold winters with little sun, basically don't happen. More would be even better, but i started with almost nothing and it worked and i'd do it again in a heartbeat.