Off The Grid

Never a dull moment... Last night the new solar system guy called and said his lights went out at 27% battery. He goes out to the mech room and finds one battery with breaker off and the other 3 are at 0% SOC. I assumed that there was some error in the capacity of the batteries and those 3 batteries had shut themselves down one at a time and the last man standing could not support the load of the house by himself. This was not the case. We used ferrules over the stranded wire going into these breakers on the battery.... the wire pulled out of the ferrule and got hot. As you can see it tripped the breaker. This caused one battery (25%) to drop off the group. Now we're down 25% on the SOC calculation. The other three batteries carried the system until they were depleted. I added another layer of logic to the connect to the grid to charge batteries scheme... If SOC is <25% charge batteries OR if the voltage is <47.8v, charge the batteries from grid. We keep learning.

👀👀😂😂😂😂 GOODNIGHT 🌎

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/267A3XnkM2A Practical taxidermy!

Hey, this was brought up in a DM with one of our admins..... do you have oil for your tractor? Do you have hydraulic oil if you burst a hose on your tractor? Do you have a handful of replacement oil filters for your tractor? A)yes. B)No. C)Wish I had a tractor D)what is a tractor?

This is what "treading water" looks like. When you make just enough power thru the day to power your house but not gain any on your battery. This is a system with 26kw of solar panels that made 1kw - 3kw all day long. This is why we buy more batteries. Tomorrow (Monday) is supposed to be sunny. If this guy had an additional 15 or 30 kwh of battery he would not be buying power later tonight.

Memory lane.... I can remember when I first looked into solar that off grid people were "quirky". They lived with composting toilets and had to deal with a great deal of "overhead" involving laundry on sunny days only. They had special 24v appliances. Fast forward 8 years.... I just commissioned a system 30 minutes from me on Dec 31. Two days ago I was sitting in the guy's kitchen and his wife casually heated something in the microwave oven. I had a cup of coffee with them... all after dark. I was sitting in their kitchen having an enjoyable conversation and it occured to me that the lights were running on batteries from a shipping container outside. Wow we've come a long way! I have 31kw of solar and 110 kwh of battery. Another neghbor has 80kwh of battery and 34kw of solar..... and he is shooting for 45kw. He is 100% off grid and a diesel generator AND has a tesla EV. We just discussed the logic for programming his EV charger to max out charging the car as a dump load. These are not your daddy's solar systems. They are quite affordable. Payback time is usually 5 years now. Heck, i can't even build the batteries for the price of retail. Such a far cry from the 24v specialized systems that were common 10 years ago.

🆒

Here's how solar works in California. Thi guy keeps mentioning 47c/kwh... thats because when you have a netmetering (solar) rate plan, you sell them power at the going wholesale rate and you buy back your own power at night at peak rate 100% of the time. The solution is not to do net metering... just get batteries and if you have a few bad days, treat the grid like a generator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBE6KyXroeI

Laundry would be a lot more fun, I'd have to add a turbo though

Both curtains on greenhouse done. They roll up from the middle.

Here's a monster solar system near here. 100% off grid. 34kw of panels, two 12000xp eg4 inverters... he's making 20kw, putting 2kw into house, 5kw into a car and still 12kw into the batteries. The car will be topped off in 5 hours.