dont really care about retrofits, or high consumption all electric home responces
i am mainly after what others have accomplished by means of careful planning and implementation
thanks
bob g
1600 sq ft 3 br home, 2 adults 3 kids.
Normal TV maybe 4 to 6 hrs a day, 30 yr old fridge, microwave, laptop, all lights are fluoro/ compact fluoro, at least one load of clothes washed per day in an efficient Fisher + Paykil washer.
Dishwasher is kind of a discretionary load depending on how much power is coming in, sometimes I use my discretion and fire up the backup generator to run it. It uses about 700Wh per wash.
We have 450W of solar (on a tracker), it's only just enough in winter if it's sunny, which fortunately is fairly often here.
We also have a windmill which peaks at over 1kW, and averages over 500W if it's windy. It complements the solar quite well, we can go for weeks without running the backup generator sometimes. On the other hand, sometimes we have to run it an hour or two every day for days on end.
The only "sacrifice" we've made is turning off all phantom loads at the power outlet (why does every appliance have a clock?), and not leaving a light on all night.
Paul.
Off-grid 5 months and stil married.[ Parent ]
How big is your batterie bank? I average the same and by December I would like to be off grid, can you describe your system - I'm trying to put a system together.
Frank[ Parent ]
Apparently it's not ideal to have so many parallel strings of batteries, but I get one or two dozen of these for free every three months or so, and most of them are good, so I'm not complaining.
Personally, I would consider this to be the bare minimum to run a full sized house; I think 600 to 800 Ah at 48V would be much easier to live with.
The rest of the system:
Solar panels - 2 Sharp 24V 165W panels mounted on a tracker, plus 120W of old solarex panels. I think I said this just keeps up on a sunny day in winter, now that I think about it the windmill probably has to chip in a bit as well.
Windmill - 9' dual rotor. If it's windy we can run the house and still waste anything up to 5kWh/ day through the shunt load.
Regulator - Plasmatronics PL60, made locally here in Australia,it can simultaneously series regulate the panels and shunt regulate the mill.
Inverter - SEA Everest 48V 3.8kW continuous/10.5kW surge, 240V 50Hz full sinewave output, again made locally. This was the most expensive part of the system, and I don't regret a cent of it. It can cope with almost any combination of normal household loads, such as running the 2.4kW element in the dishwasher while the fridge, TV and laptop are on, without even getting warm.
And of course the backup generator, the less said about that the better. I really need a nice diesel cogeneration setup.
Paul
Off grid 5 months and still married. [ Parent ]
