Off The Grid

Missouri Wind and Solar just emailed me. https://windandsolar.com/products/runergy-bgrade-580w-144-cell-bifacial-solar-panel-no-warranty

Coldest day of hte year so far... The outer ring of my basement is 52f 12C, batteries are a nice toasty 17c... and outside it's 21F -6c. The outer ring is a 10ft high space that is 3/4 in the earth. What a wonderful temperature regulator. The heat pump finally reached "saturation" last night where there arent any resting times. But it's still only pulling 1/2 power 1300w. This is a 3.5ton ducted minisplit heating a 4800sqft ICF house.

I cant believe what i'm reading!

Feeding Chickens Without Grain - Cut Your Costs 100%

Imagine your battery is a fuel tank. But you can only be sure how much fuel is in it when it gets full. So each day when you fill it and see gas coming out the filler spout, you know it is full. Now you can never measure the depth of the liquid so you have a flow meter that tells you how many gallons or liters per hour are flowing out. You track this by subtracting each hour of usage from the full capacity of the tank. Thats a pretty good assumption but what if there's a leak in the tank you don't know about? What happens when your 25% assumed remaining fuel is suddenly missing? If you keep tabs on the flow meter you'll never know it. This is essentially what happened last night when one battery took itself off line. So what I did by telling the inverter to charge from grid when voltage is at 47v was the same as putting a float switch near the bottom of a fuel tank as a second method of checking the amount of fuel remaining.

More lessons. Pay attention boy I'm talking to you. When I got the system up and running again, 3 batteries were at 0% SOC 46v. And one that had tripped it self lastnight was at 53v. When I allowed the BMS to connect to the other three, there was ~360amps flowing out of that one pack. JKBMS caught it as it was supposed to and disabled discharge within 3 seconds. So I left discharge disabled and allowed the other batteries to charge to the voltage of that lone pack and THEN enabled discharge on it once again. Now the opposite situation is that you have 3 strong packs and introduce a pack at a lower voltage into the system. In this case, JKBMS would see high charge amps and would switch on it's current limiter. That pack would safely charge at 10amp for the rest of the day until it caught the others. So do NOT introduce a single higher voltage pack into a group. But it is safe to connect a lower voltage pack to a group as along as the BMS has charge current limiting like JK BMS does.

Breakers trip for three things... sudden short circuits (magnetic trip), continuous current over their rating (overload) and thermal (a loose wire).