Off The Grid

Not much going on here.... it's cold.... it was too cold and windy to put up the curtains on the greenhouse yesterday, maybe saturday. So I've been cleaning out the outer basement... I'm on the third trip to the dump now and still working my way around. I figure a pass to weed out stuff we havent used in 20 years.. a pass to shuffle the good stuff around and maybe a 3rd pass to organize. There really is a fine line between prepping and hoarding.

Yes... it is supposed to help.

Nothing like plowing to make the deer come investigate. This is that fire break i plowed the other day.

Better get ready.

Plowing fire break today with my companion.

Here are two identical inverters, one is overpaneled by 25% the other is overpaneled by 100%. We can't know how much power the lesser paneled array will make each day or even if it will reach peak power but we DO know that the 100% overpanelled system will make 100% of it's power from 10:30 to 14:30.

Overpanelling is when you put more solar panel capacity in the system than your inverters or MPPT chargers can utilize. It is common to over panel by 25% but in the past two years I've been overpaneling by 100% or more. The advantage is that in cloudy weather you can still be assured to make reliable predicable amounts of power. Here's a screen shot of an offgrid system that simply stops making power once the batteries are full. If the batteries had not filled up at 14:00 the system would have continued to make the same power per hour until 1600. In this system we have capped the MPPT chargers at 80% of their capacity so 8.5kw and feeding them with 26kw of panels. A few days ago it was so cloudy I couldn't see the shape of the sun, just a bright haze and we still made full power. You can never have too much horsepower on tap and you can never have too many panels on the roof.

LAWYER: If Cops Demand Your Window Down, DO THIS https://youtube.com/watch?v=y-a-hvlhsi8&si=oHa74DWukZPetPBD