My battery bank is made up of used 12V 36Ah Sonnenschein sealed wheelchair batteries. I have 40 of these wired in series/parallel to make a 48V/360 Ah battery bank, although the actual Ah rating is probably a bit less than that .
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.
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