Solar Power

[Guruji]

Schematic

here is how you can have your cake and eat it to.

Sun 250 Watt Grid tie & Xantrex 3000 Watt modified sine wave inverter Tied - YouTube

"free your mind the rest will follow"

So, right now, I have a small 20 watt solar panel charging a 25Ah battery during the day.

At night I take that battery and charge my 1kAh bank SS SSG w/ CPDmod

the next morning I take that bank and plug it into the GTI and into a wall outlet, power some stuff all day long - while my panel is charging the 25Ah primary again.

poof, that's it - simple
now if I want access to the energy during an outage, add the Xantrex or something similar to the setup.

This is real energy folks, not a toy hobby anymore.

Hi Minoly if that vid is yours can you please post a schematic of what exactly you're doing with those inverters?
Thanks

[Farmhand]

Hi Minoly, Getting a solar setup together, good job . I'm concerned
about the little grid tie inverters, are they powered directly from the solar panels ?

Could you please give us a block diagram or something to show how you arranged the setup ?

Cheers

[totoalas]

Teardown of a grid tie solar inverter

Teardown: The power inverter - from sunlight to power grid - 2012-01-13 18:40:51 | EDN

[minoly]

If power goes down, a small inverter can be used for the Grid Tie to sync off of.
you need to have your house disconnected 100% from the grid if you do this.
you could kill or at least hurt someone working on the lines in your neighborhood and when the power comes back on, it will not be the same as your inverter's and you will fry your equipment or worse - FIRE!

Where we live, the city installs an auto shut off. In the event of a power outage, our system is disconnected from the city. This is real power, don't mess with it if you do not know what you are doing.

[velacreations]

I've been living off the grid for over 12 years now, full solar and wind power.

The first step to doing this was to audit our energy usage, then we cut out the majority of wasteful energy (close dryers, appliances, TV, etc), and got more efficient appliances on things we needed (fridge, freezer, laptops, etc).

We pieced our system together over the years, little by little. We currently have 350 watts of solar and 2 x 100 watt wind turbines. This is enough for our 1300 sf house and family of 4.

So, don't let anyone tell you it can't be done. We have less than $3000 in our system, spread out over a few years, so it was affordable, and we haven't paid an electric bill in over a decade.

Watch the net for solar panels, when they come on sale, be ready to buy. If you can afford them, go with NiFe batteries (Edison cells), they will outlive you.

[velacreations]

on a side note, if there is another technology that is practical and cheap enough to replace solar panels, please show us. I've been following this board, and others like it, for many years, and I have yet to see a practical device or technology that could replace my solar panels. I wish there was one, but there just isn't (yet?)

[Ein~+ein]

I've heard that solar only captures a narrow range of the visible spectrum. I've even seen a sci-fi flick where the implications of discovering how to extend that range affected the geo-political power balance.

[electr0n]

I have a 2.7Kw gridtie system here which ive upgraded over the years, panels were around .70-.80c per watt imported. I built a separate battery system with 460w of panels, that just does all the lights in the house (led). ontop of that a hot water heat pump which uses avg 440w (270l cylinder) and for 2-3 showers per day uses about .8 Kwhrs.
I would recommend it to anyone, as long as your electricity supplier has a reasonable rate. Here in NZ charges for day/night differ as they probably do in other countries. I built a microprocessor relay circuit that measures the light and starts the washing machine,hot water heat pump,dishwasher etc when the panels can supply the load.
last month we got a cheque from the power company , mostly it averages out to around $20-$30 per month....sure beats what it was ($250p/m).

The cost layout will vary greatly depending on your assembly input, panels are one thing, you need mounting, cabling to the array, with conduit, a DC isolation switch (so you can turn the array off) a suitable grid inverter compliant for your lines people, which gets wired to the fusebox in your house. Then an electrical inspector to certify the installation, some paperwork with the settings and agreements, an export meter installed to the meter box (nz needs this) and your in shape
Its not hard to do, go for it is all i can say
regards
Jim

[Guruji]

I've been living off the grid for over 12 years now, full solar and wind power.

The first step to doing this was to audit our energy usage, then we cut out the majority of wasteful energy (close dryers, appliances, TV, etc), and got more efficient appliances on things we needed (fridge, freezer, laptops, etc).

We pieced our system together over the years, little by little. We currently have 350 watts of solar and 2 x 100 watt wind turbines. This is enough for our 1300 sf house and family of 4.

So, don't let anyone tell you it can't be done. We have less than $3000 in our system, spread out over a few years, so it was affordable, and we haven't paid an electric bill in over a decade.

Watch the net for solar panels, when they come on sale, be ready to buy. If you can afford them, go with NiFe batteries (Edison cells), they will outlive you.

Impressive this Vela living 12yrs off grid