I've posted before about how complicated my system is likely to get. I will wind up needing a lot of RE, and it will end up being spread around in several fairly distant areas of my land (100 feet away to 400 feet away from the house). I'm thinking of putting some batteries and a cheap modified sine-wave inverter in each of my "sub-stations", and running wire sized and breakered for only maybe 1000 watts from each "substation" to the main station in my house. Probably also a bundle of monitoring and control wires along with the juice.
I figure a relatively small amount of storage in the house, with redundant charging voltage coming from all over the property and a really good pair of 48V-->240 single phase inverter/chargers mounted inside the main house.
Separate heavy duty 240V coming from the propane generator straight to the inputs on the main house inverters, programmed for auto-genny start as a last resort.
At a minimum, I can have monitoring capability in the form of checking for incoming voltage from each of my substations, and have all the monitoring and control of the main inverters right there in the power closet in the house (and right next to the main panel for the house).
The tricky part is going to be coming up with the right way to control the charging of the "in-house" battery from so many AC sources. Need to avoid having one or more substations sitting there "needing to be milked" so to speak, and wasting any energy they make, whilst some other station might be dipping into its reserves at the same time to supply the house with charging current and load current.
I plan to keep the KISS principle firmly in mind while I violate it to pieces. I'm thinking that maybe the redundancy will make up for some of the complexity I'm adding.
I'm thinking the small amount of in-house storage (probably 4 8-D size batteries) will be housed inside a concrete block "vault" that is vented to the outside. Anybody think that would be insufficient to contain an exploding 8-D battery? I have no clue. Maybe line the inside of the "vault" with quarter inch diamond plate. Fuse the line inside the vault.
I know everyone who sees this will think "that's way too complex, it will never work". I know, I know, but nobody has suggested another solution that will work well for distributed energy production.
jp