[HN Gopher] Building my own solar power system
___________________________________________________________________
Building my own solar power system
Author : JKCalhoun
Score : 394 points
Date : 2025-05-18 18:07 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| stevoski wrote:
| To save you the click, it's about building a solar electricity
| system.
|
| And not a cosmic solar system.
| stevoski wrote:
| Ah, the title was edited, so now my comment seems nonsensical.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| _to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the
| universe._
| sponaugle wrote:
| My favorite Cosmos episode (#9)!
| epistasis wrote:
| This is fantastic. Looking at the absolutely massive cost
| differential between DIY and full-service solar installers, the
| DIY option looks _pretty_ _pretty_ tempting. My main concern was
| 1) actually getting through the local permitting process, and 2)
| what a potential purchaser would think of a DIY system when I go
| to sell the house.
|
| Seeing that somebody has done it is very inspiring, and if I
| didn't see a high chance of moving in the next 5 years I'd be on
| it tomorrow.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I have the advantage of living totally off grid and not
| planning on ever selling the place, so I can have whatever
| screwy setup I fancy.
|
| Well - I say "off grid" but I've built a grid - I now have over
| a km of buried SWA cable linking the three houses on our land,
| battery banks at each (60kWh of OPzS down at the mill, 15kWh of
| LiFePO4 at each of the others), and victron inverter-chargers
| all over the shop. Two arrays of panels each 8kW, one winter
| optimised, one summer optimised, and planning on adding a third
| to make more of the morning sun, as we are in a deep and steep
| valley with awkward topography. Have mucked around with hydro
| on and off before landing on a plan for an overshot waterwheel
| using bits of a burned-out '88 hilux, which is my current
| project. Pessimistically it will give us a constant 1.5kW, but
| theoretically it should end up nearer 3. Either way, that's a
| lot of power. Right now I'm stuck running a Honda generator off
| our biogas in the winter, and it works, but it's noisy and I
| have to go yank the cord to start it, usually in the pouring
| rain.
|
| Using victron and fronius gear all over, frequency shifting to
| control where the power goes, and home assistant to automate
| the whole shebang where it's beyond what the inverters and
| chargers can do themselves.
|
| As we aren't grid connected, the permitting process is... "you
| do what you want".
|
| It's all far, far more straightforward than most people think -
| the hard bit is the physical install, as you're inevitably
| lugging awkward panels onto roofs or up cliffs (going for
| smaller panels can help with this if you're doing it without
| any help), or incredibly heavy batteries to wherever they need
| to be. The lithium arrays weigh about 150kg each, the lead
| array the better part of 2000kg.
|
| People assume it must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros,
| but no - all in it has been about EUR30k, and our ongoing costs
| are zero.
| davedx wrote:
| Yeah, we once unmounted our panels so painters could do some
| work on our roof. It was pretty trivial to do. The tricky
| part is the electrical work.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| That sounds amazing, would love to be able to check it out.
|
| Out of curiosity, have you ever calculated the cost of the
| batteries over their expected lifetime ?
| baq wrote:
| DYI if your dad is an electrician. I wonder what the total
| would be if he tallied his dad's assistance at market rates -
| probably not that much less than the initial quotes he got from
| professionals.
| rusk wrote:
| Depending on the jurisdiction you could be saving a whopper
| amount on taxes. Where I live the service tax could be
| anything up to 23% and the guys doing the work have to pay
| income tax. Insurance would also be a factor where I live
| too. There are massive savings if you can get a friend to do
| it or if somebody does it for cash (which is considered tax
| evasion)
| 9dev wrote:
| I'm still curious what you'd need a rack consuming 1kw for... in
| your garage. From the photo, it looks like lots of storage(?).
| sneak wrote:
| 1kW is less than a toaster, fwiw.
|
| I draw 1-1.5kW for my servers in a spare bedroom. It's not a
| lot of spindles/cores, just a few dozen.
| padjo wrote:
| Not many people run their toaster 24/7/365
| nicolaslem wrote:
| It is always surprising to me but small loads that are on
| 24/7 end up consuming a ton of energy. My 55W idle
| "homelab" consumes as much energy as my dishwasher, fridge
| and washing machine _combined_.
| jaapz wrote:
| 1kW continuously is 8760kWh per year. To compare, my house
| used 6200kWh in total over 2024, including heating.
|
| Your toaster draws 1kW for maybe 5 minutes a day, which is
| maybe 30kWh per year.
|
| The power in this comparison is not important, it's the total
| energy consumed (which is what you are billed for in the
| end).
| sneak wrote:
| yes, computers use a lot of energy, and spinning disks in
| my 40 hard drives use even more.
| 9dev wrote:
| > 1kW is less than a toaster, fwiw.
|
| Odd argument. A cheetah can run up to 110kmh, but that
| doesn't mean they can cross 110 kilometres in an hour.
| jmb99 wrote:
| My hard drives alone pull 200W idle and I don't have _that_
| many. Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the
| time but can be up to 300W. Each 10GbE NIC pulls ~40W. PoE
| switch gives ~30W to each of my APs, and uses ~80W itself, so
| there's another 300W. All of my RAM pulls about 250W
| (admittedly there's nearly 2TB of it in the rack, but still).
| Start adding up CPUs idle /average/max power and the numbers
| get way bigger.
|
| If all he's pulling is 1kW I'm jealous.
| xarope wrote:
| I'm curious, are you getting this with a kill-a-watt (or
| equivalent), or are you adding up wattage by specifications
| alone?
|
| (I do have an epyc with a bunch of memory and storage, but
| never bothered doing the math since my UPS claims to be able
| to run with the average load for 30+mins)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If I had more than 100 watts in idle hard drives, I'd start
| aggressively figuring out how to let them spin down. Maybe
| his drives are actually doing something 24 hours a day? But
| probably not.
|
| Networking gear taking that much when it's not busy is really
| unfortunate. Did IEEE slack on adding effective
| sleep/downclocking features?
| mafuy wrote:
| It sounds like the 10GbE is not fiber. With fiber, it would
| take around 5W only, depending on your needs. It's a bit
| harder to use, but fiber is really the better option if you
| want a serious homelab.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time
| but can be up to 300W._
|
| Oxide Computer found that going from tiny 20mm fans to 80mm
| dropped their chassis power usage bigly: they found a rack
| full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans
| (efficiency is to the cube of the radius).
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q
| mdaniel wrote:
| My mental model is that such a choice is why a data center
| is deafening: all those tiny fans spinning at hella rpm
| kalleboo wrote:
| 40W for a 10GbE NIC sounds crazy, my internet router has a
| dual 10 GbE Intel NIC with one 10GBaseT SFP+ and one 10G DAC
| and the whole router only draws 24 W (Lenovo ThinkCentre
| Tiny)
|
| My whole "rack" draws about 120W total with: aforementioned
| router, Synology NAS with 4 drives, 2x10G+4x2.5G PoE switch
| powering a Ubiquiti AP, 16-port 1G switch, and a PowerBook
| 540c running AppleTalk routing
| sponaugle wrote:
| I'm running 100G CWDM4s in my homelab, and those only take
| about 4w each for the optics, so I suspect with the PCIe
| card it is less than 10w.
| sponaugle wrote:
| 1kW sounds pretty good to me!
|
| My homelab is between 4 and 8 kW continuously, depending on
| what I have running. Cooling that homelab is another 400-1000
| watts depending on outside air temp.
| hengheng wrote:
| Yeah, I wondered the same.
|
| He mentioned that he refuses downsizing for ideological
| reasons, and I totally get that, but there's a certain amount
| of rightsizing that doesn't hurt in practical operation, and
| still let's you keep what feels like an awesome, big, complex
| model train setup in your garage.
|
| Not all rust has to spin, almost no ports have to be 10GE, and
| a lot can be virtualized. Consumer CPUs have much lower idle
| than old xeons, and having less DIMMs with the same capacity
| also seems to pay off.
|
| I'd be surprised if he couldn't cut that energy usage to 10%
| with a clear separation between hot and cold storage, and
| realistic expectations of bandwidth requirements.
|
| But hey, I'm not judging. Solar power is great, and I don't
| mind waste as long as he can afford it and it makes him happy.
| Nobody drives the car they actually need either, and that is a
| much bigger problem.
| yasir326 wrote:
| With the rising price of energy, this is a fantastic idea
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Well big chunk of the electricity cost are fixed cost, meaning
| if enough people lower their bill with PV and batteries then
| prices will have to rise for their connection. In fact some
| suggest that it would make more sense to let people pay a flat
| rate.
| brnt wrote:
| And over here in NL we're going to be _charged_ when returning
| power to the grid in 1.5 yr... I'll be running my airco to burn
| off those kWh's :P
| baq wrote:
| The grid needs batteries and that's how they make you buy some.
| They have good reasons - look at Spain.
|
| Running aircon to burn the excess is better than feeding an
| already overloaded grid, too. The second best outcome for them,
| neatly contained in a single euro amount.
| tralarpa wrote:
| What should the grid operators do with all that energy that
| comes in at noon on a beautiful sunny day?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Heat up molten salt, or shipping containers full of sand.
| It's a surprisingly high density and cheap way to store an
| awful lot of energy. Don't have sand batteries here yet, but
| they're on my todo for deep storage of excess energy, which I
| currently just dump as heat into the air.
| rmu09 wrote:
| I don't know. Salt (NaCl) is corrosive. Specific heat
| capacity is not that high (about 1/5th of water per
| weight). Suppose you have cubic meter of molten salt at
| 800degC in a dewar, how do you get the heat out again?
| elcritch wrote:
| Hmmm, run direct carbon capture systems?
| delamon wrote:
| Pump it to the storage. Building something like
| https://www.energyvault.com/products/g-vault-gravity-
| energy-... is impossible for a home owner. But the country
| scale energy provider can build such thing.
| kleiba wrote:
| Great idea, but that also comes at an additional cost - who
| would you recommend should pay for that cost?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Storage comes at a cost, but storing cheap/free power
| offsets even bigger generation costs. So the power
| company should pay to build storage.
|
| There's a point where the grid has so much solar power
| that we need to start shedding production as a general
| rule and not just as an intermittent temporary measure,
| but I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
| cduzz wrote:
| Technically almost all homes have a wonderful energy
| storage system already -- their hot water heater tank.
|
| One can imagine a setup where you've got a hot water tank
| and a mixing valve that allows you to heat your water up to
| some very high temperature and then mix that down to "safe"
| hot water for the house. Have that run in "heat from grid
| if below this threshold, otherwise conditionally heat with
| surplus energy if the water's below this temperature"
| elcritch wrote:
| > I'll be running my airco to burn off those kWh's :P
|
| As an American I welcome you to our national pastime: burning
| kWhs on aircon! :P
| davedx wrote:
| We've been on a dynamic contract for the last year (also in
| NL), it's worked out pretty well (Tibber).
| markvdb wrote:
| Already happening in Flanders for those on dynamic pricing.
| miniwark wrote:
| Don't you have energy cooperatives to avoid this in the
| Netherlands ? According to rescoop.eu i did find
| hetcooperatie.nl, energiesamen.nu & lochemenergie.org.
|
| Even if you are instead in Newfoundland, maybe ask
| cecooperative.ca if there us a project to create one in your
| province.
| sneak wrote:
| It's a true shame that the public utility commission is so
| corrupt that we lose the obvious economies of scale from grid-
| scale installations of same in favor of expensive rent seeking by
| a state-sanctioned monopoly.
|
| I also have 60kWh of batteries in my kitchen, but for the average
| person who doesn't want to deal with this stuff, having to admin
| part of the power grid is a tragic waste.
|
| If the PUC and power company weren't bastards, this could all be
| in a giant field somewhere staffed by a tiny fraction of the
| people who have to waste their lives dealing with it in their
| garages. So many unnecessary struts, so much caulk and EPO
| switches, so many inverters.
| epistasis wrote:
| It turns out that the biggest cost of California energy is not
| generation, it's distribution and transmission.
|
| Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D
| system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which
| greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar
| requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent
| that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding
| solar to the grid in most of the US.
|
| So even if installation costs of solar are higher on the grid
| edge, it usually makes a ton of sense, and this is evident in
| the payoff times of NEM3 systems that include batteries. As
| batteries get cheaper, or there's more vehicle-to-home systems
| out there, it will only increase.
|
| This lessened need for T&D is the true reason that utilities in
| California hate solar and need to stop it. They can take a
| guaranteed rate of profit from anything they get to spend on
| T&D, but the same isn't true of generation. So utility solar,
| which requires building more lines and beefing up distribution
| substations more, lets them profit much more than residential
| solar.
| sneak wrote:
| How many office parking lots would be covered in solar
| carports immediately if the corrupt PUC paid reasonable rates
| for generation?
|
| This solves the T&D problem too, as generation remains
| distributed.
|
| It's the money.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Not so easy to reduce the grid load all the time, needs a
| big battery for every night and for multiple dark days you
| still need the grid a lot.
| sneak wrote:
| Paying reasonable rates for generation also incentivizes
| distributed storage for anyone who wants to buy batteries
| and help load shift.
|
| Large neighborhood batteries seem to make a lot more
| sense to me than batteries in every home.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Would be nice, the rate could be grid size battery/PV +
| cost savings from localized production. Not sure if it is
| economically feasible then.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > Large neighborhood batteries
|
| Boy people hated their HOA before, imagine how much
| they'll hate their HOA (because neighborhood batteries
| would need to be owned by someone, and that someone is
| the HOA) when they can cut off your power bc you left a
| garbage can out too long!
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Spinning steam turbine generators also can't just turn
| on/off instantly. They need to ramp up/down. If you can't
| ramp up fast enough to meet demand, you have issues. When
| solar drops off pretty fast, and people come home from
| work and start turning on appliances, you suddenly have a
| huge amount of power needed from generators.
|
| Even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
|
| The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't
| really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the
| batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog
| mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to
| solar and battery.
| epistasis wrote:
| Big batteries are actually very easy, and getting cheap
| enough that they account for a significant chunk of new
| grid assets when there are enough renewables.
|
| Take the Texas ERCOT market, which is the closest thing
| to a free electricity market that exists in the US. A
| huge chunk of new grid assets are batteries, becuase they
| are one of the most profitable things to install right
| now (see the map at the bottom of the page)
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
|
| Additionally, many people are now buying EVs, and an EV
| stores 2-5 days worth of electricity. If big batteries on
| wheels are commonplace, then simpler and cheaper immobile
| batteries are pretty easy too.
| jopsen wrote:
| Is it the generation that cost, or the promise that you'll
| always have power?
|
| Keeping capacity ready is probably the expensive bit.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| you're making a big assumption here - that the demand peak
| coincides with the distributed generation peak. This is
| generally not true.
| epistasis wrote:
| In California, the subject of my comment, it is true.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| it generally isn't.
|
| Peak demand on most electricity systems, including
| California's, is during the evening hours, typically
| between 18:00 and 21:00. This does not coincide with peak
| solar generation.
|
| You can see this even as far back as 2018 via CalISO's
| own data. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook
| epistasis wrote:
| That's because residential solar is eating up the daytime
| peak, thus the duck curve. Residential solar is already
| saving the state tons of money on T&D costs.
|
| (And becuase the Wikipedia for duck curve shows a day in
| October rather than a summer day where the peak is much
| higher, yes the annual peak does coincide with when solar
| is outputting a ton of power.)
| eldaisfish wrote:
| CalISO's charts disagree with you.
|
| Gross peak demand is in the late evening, well after the
| solar peak. Solar noon in western California is around
| 13:00.
|
| https://www.caiso.com/documents/gross-and-net-load-peaks-
| fac...
| epistasis wrote:
| You misunderstand the charts, these do not take into
| account residential solar. The reason the peak is getting
| pushed into the evening is because residential solar
| doesn't even show up on the chart.
|
| Look at the difference between gross and net: this is
| utility scale shaving off the peak. This is what is
| happening with residential solar too, which is not shown.
| BrtByte wrote:
| The fact that so many people are turning their homes into mini
| power plants is less a triumph of individualism and more a
| symptom of a broken system
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Abstracting away from any particular grid regulatory
| environment, distributed solar and batteries make sense and
| make more and more sense as the cost reduces.
|
| Another way of saying that, if we were playing a city
| simulator as a disembodied beneficent dictator you'd want
| distributed generation and storage as part of your grid.
|
| In reality there's all sorts of complications, compromises,
| trade-offs, graft and politics but on balance those factors
| are working against distributed solar which is succeeding
| despite them.
|
| Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that
| requires legislation, regulation or subsidies which clouds
| the issue though.
| sneak wrote:
| There's distributed and then there's piecemeal. It doesn't
| make sense to try to fit large energy storage safely inside
| every residential building.
|
| You could build fireproof mini storage substations in
| blocks or subdivisions to load shift, but taking a chunk
| out of everyone's garage space and forcing every person to
| do inverter and battery maintenance is silly.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Yeah nothing about home install solar + battery soundly
| beating utility power prices _even paying retail rates for
| equipment and labor_ for years on end, as prices on the
| equipment falls year after year, while utility power prices
| keep going up makes any fucking sense.
| alex-moon wrote:
| Having done some work around net zero policy I am increasingly
| convinced that this is the way forward, and indeed that this will
| be the way things are done normally maybe 10-20 years from now.
| The concept is called "distributed generation" and in UK each
| distribution network keeps an "embedded capacity register" which
| is basically all the distributed energy resources that are
| connected to the grid at distribution level (i.e. in the local
| area). Over here the national grid largely operates at or over
| capacity, which is a very serious problem for the immediate
| future, especially as more and more power is drained by compute-
| heavy infrastructure (data centers and such). Distributed
| generation is an attractive solution for households regardless of
| which angle you look at it from.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Well problem in the UK is that in summer there is like a
| magnitude more power from PV then in winter.
| calgoo wrote:
| I personally feel there should be more allowance for small
| personal wind generators in sub-urban areas. That would
| offset a bit at least in winter for places like the UK. Not
| sure what the actual laws are, but I can assume councils wont
| be too happy about someone putting one up on their home.
| Teever wrote:
| I was under the impression that small wind generators at
| the scale of suburban backyards are really uneconomical and
| don't produce sufficient energy for anything of practical
| use.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I wonder what studies may exist on this. Were they all
| funded by Big Wind?
| teamonkey wrote:
| Laws of physics: maximum power that can be generated is
| proportional to the swept area of the blades. So it
| scales exponentially as blade length increases.
| kragen wrote:
| The swept area of the blades scales quadratically with
| the blade length, not exponentially. Exponential scaling
| is _f_ ( _x_ ) = _knx_ , not _f_ ( _x_ ) = _kxn_.
|
| The difference between quadratic scaling and exponential
| scaling is earth-shatteringly enormous; this is not some
| minor detail.
|
| With quadratic scaling, if f(1) = 1 and f(2) = 4, then
| f(10) = 100.
|
| With exponential scaling, if f(1) = 1 and f(2) = 4, then
| f(10) = 262144, a 2600x difference. And the difference
| gets bigger from there on out.
| teamonkey wrote:
| Unfortunately I can no longer edit the post, but of
| course you're right. Max generated power is proportional
| to (blade length)^2, therefore quadratic, not
| exponential.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| small wind turbines are also horrendously unreliable
| because of mechanical failure. Same logic as to why
| pickup trucks are generally more reliable than a smart
| car.
| detaro wrote:
| Wind generators really scale with size though. Small ones
| rarely make sense
| kragen wrote:
| If the objective is to reduce the number of hours you're
| not self-sufficient for a given battery size, or reduce
| the size of your expensive batteries, even a couple
| hundred watts could make sense.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/NINILADY-Vertical-Generator-
| Controlle... is a 600-watt-peak wind generator, designed
| for 11m/s winds, for sale in the US for US$300,
| presumably much cheaper in countries that aren't
| descending into kleptocratic tyranny. (I talked to
| someone who recently bought something similar for US$60.
| I think it was a 300-watt turbine.) It's a vertical-axis
| type, less than a meter in diameter. No worries about
| annoying the neighbors, and it'll probably do a great job
| of keeping your fridge running most of the time when it's
| cloudy.
|
| 50C/ per peak watt would be a terrible, uncompetitive
| price if you were a utility company considering how to
| build a wind farm to sell power for profit. But, if
| you're a homeowner seeking energy self-sufficiency
| because your Public Utilities Commission is trying to
| throw you under the bus because of regulatory capture,
| it's pretty affordable.
| lazide wrote:
| The issue is the payback is not worth the hate from your
| neighbors and capital cost. at least solar panels are
| quiet.
| kragen wrote:
| If you have a house, you aren't going to get hate from
| your neighbors for a tiny turbine like this; it may not
| be quite as silent as solar panels, but it's pretty
| quiet.
| alex-moon wrote:
| Hence "community energy" - you do it with your neighbours
| - this model has worked in Scotland before -
| https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-16/rebel-
| cities-t... - here is one from earlier this year -
| https://www.thenational.scot/news/24993445.local-groups-
| bid-... - and recent changes in planning legislation mean
| we should be seeing more of these in England in the near
| future -
| https://communityenergyengland.org/pages/community-wind
| kragen wrote:
| Community energy makes sense for 2,000,000-watt windmills
| like the ones in your first article, but not for a
| 600-watt rooftop windmill that's less than a meter
| across. The 2,000,000-watt windmill _ought to_ cost less
| per watt, but it requires successfully coordinating the
| community to support it (cf. the note in your third link
| about a "de facto ban on new onshore wind projects"
| being lifted). And looking at
| https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/wind/chart-wind-
| turbine... it looks like over the period 02015 to 02022
| the prices of big windmills consistently stayed in the
| range of 80C/ to 130C/ per peak watt, which is actually
| _more_ than the 50C/ per peak watt of the mail-order
| Amazon rooftop windmill.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Uneconomical and the sort of thing that _really_ annoys the
| neighbors. We only just got onshore wind unbanned entirely,
| and Reform are heavily against permitting renewables at
| all.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| They barely produce anything at all. You really need a
| bigger one and putting it very high up for it to generate
| any real power.
| butshouldyou wrote:
| Every reply is talking about how wind doesn't make sense,
| how its uneconomical, or how its a nuisance. I can offer an
| opposing take:
|
| My father has been using wind power in a semi-suburban area
| in the Uk for close to 20 years now. They have a large wind
| turbine now but had a much smaller one for a long time.
| Outside of cookie-cutter estates, there's sufficient tree
| and building cover that its barely visible to the
| neighbors. It provides most of their home power.
| sgt wrote:
| Eventually it'll become noisy, yet provide little value.
| kragen wrote:
| No, having more power isn't a problem for solar; unlike coal
| or nuclear, solar can curtail production instantly and
| without suffering wear and tear. The problem is that in the
| UK in the winter there is an order of magnitude _less_ power
| from PV than in the summer.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| magnitude less power from PV than in the summer
|
| magnitude more power from PV than in the winter
|
| That is a tautology.
| butshouldyou wrote:
| However, the implied meaning is significant. This site is
| full of engineers who, if they're good, invest a lot of
| time into understanding the implied meaning of what's
| said.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Add smart storage and demand response, and you've basically got
| a decentralized resilience network
| pjc50 wrote:
| One of those areas where policy action is desperately needed
| but no attention is paid due to media dysfunction. I think the
| UK would benefit from region-specific pricing, to move the
| datacenters closer to generation rather than urban
| environments. It would also encourage more embedded generation
| in expensive areas.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Politics however them collides, with "postcode lottery"
| headlines
|
| Democracy really limits governments
| ta1243 wrote:
| And despite HN people not liking this reality, here's some
| examples
|
| https://www.gbnews.com/money/energy-bills-rise-postcode-
| lott...
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/energy-
| prices...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yeah. It would be more accurate to say that newspapers hate
| local government as a concept, but a lot of the public are
| happy to go along with that and get peeved about any
| difference which is pointed out to them.
|
| (nobody ever describes house prices as a "postcode
| lottery"!)
| ta1243 wrote:
| Talk radio and TV are just as bad, as are the opposition.
| If Tories proposed it, Labour would be up in arms about
| postcode lottery. If Labour proposed it, exactly the same
| from the other side.
|
| Doesn't matter how sensible it is, the other side will
| use it to score points. I can't believe for a second that
| Liberal Democrats think that James Dyson or Andrew Lloyd
| Webber should be able to avoid inheritance tax by buying
| tens of millions of pounds of farmland, but it's
| politically beneficial for them to do so.
| 7952 wrote:
| The cost for generators to connect is already based on region
| (TNUoS pricing).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Love to see housing developments, rather than just adding an
| overbearing HOA, would instead consider neighborhood power
| grids (and perhaps a collective ISP while we're wishing for
| things).
| butshouldyou wrote:
| There really aren't any HOAs in the UK. Some newer houses
| have a covenant which resticts some things but people push
| back on those pretty hard.
| leovander wrote:
| I feel like they overpaid maybe because they got direct to
| consumer rates for the gear. If you would have went through a
| full on solar installer that solar system would have come out to
| less than $15k, throw in having to get the subpanel and a reroof
| you would maybe be looking at $30k all in. (Not including the
| batteries, but by the time he got to the batteries I feel like
| his budget was way overboard even going the non-microinverter
| route).
|
| Make sure you are buying and not leasing from the company, have
| that all rolled into a single loan and then you claim the tax
| credits to help pay for the reroof.
|
| To add to this, they take care of getting the certified roofers,
| the city permits for both the roof and solar and handle the PTO
| for you, which from what you called out is even more costs.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| No way, man - yes, they overpaid for some of their gear, but
| the labour cost of an installer ends up being most of what you
| pay.
|
| No, the smart move here is to find out where the installers buy
| from, and buy from them. I never explicitly stated I was or
| wasn't an installer, they just assumed that I was, as I was
| buying pallets of panels and kilometres of cabling.
|
| The _one_ advantage of going with a professional installer is
| that it makes it a lot easier to get grants - I had to spin up
| a company and invoice myself to get my rebate.
| babushkaboi wrote:
| This is brilliant. Energy self-sufficiency often associated with
| off-grid eccentricity,looks engineerable for city homes. Goes to
| show that the more "personal" our energy solutions become, the
| more they reflect institutional failure. Wonder how this scales
| and if it does what are the political implications?
|
| Funnily enough back home along the equator, having a solar setup
| still is a social signal of luxury!
| donnachangstein wrote:
| [flagged]
| esskay wrote:
| Ah yes...because the simple solution is always "just pack up
| your life, leave behind your family and friends, and relocate
| half way across the country".
| donnachangstein wrote:
| Relocating is a simpler ask to most ordinary people than is
| turning their garage into a battery vault.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's the most ridiculous claim I've seen in a while.
|
| Giving up one foot of space along one garage wall is not a
| big deal. And if you're worried about physically getting
| the batteries into place, hiring people would still be
| cheaper than movers.
|
| Also, a basement that removes cooling costs for the home
| lab would not make a big difference. If the 800W A/C unit
| runs 8 hours a day for 4 months out of the year, then it's
| only about 10% of the home lab power use. Since it's not
| needed at night it's probably even less.
| jajko wrote:
| From logical/cost perspective maybe, from emotional not so
| much... is it really that hard to see it?
| esskay wrote:
| Yeah sorry but thats the most insane take anyone could
| have. You're again quite litterally saying upping sticks
| and moving across country, so new job, losing friends and
| family, etc is the best option, vs losing a big of garage
| space...
| willis936 wrote:
| Unironically that is what cost-of-living is forcing a lot of
| people to do in coastal cities. If you have a cushy six
| figure salary you aren't faced with that reality, but it's
| different for median-income.
| borski wrote:
| Yeah, because you don't lose anything by living in the middle
| of nowhere.
|
| There are benefits to being in the bay area, too. This
| _happens_ to not be one of them.
|
| Living in "a part of the country that has basements" is no
| utopia either.
|
| Also: my house, in the bay area... has a basement.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That cellar wouldn't stay that temperature once they put a 1 kW
| heater element in there though.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Yeah, he spent a ton, but he clearly wanted to stay where he is
| and took control of the situation in a way that fits his
| priorities
| lostlogin wrote:
| Many of us like where we live, like our jobs and like our warn
| out old houses.
|
| There are plenty of more efficient ways of doing things, but I
| still stuck solar on this old, energy inefficient house.
| gniv wrote:
| I don't understand the comment about the small battery from
| installers. Don't they allow customization?
| davedx wrote:
| He estimated break even at 2-3 years.
| agumonkey wrote:
| reddit thread with the article author commenting
| https://old.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1kpm2cb/i_got_sick...
| g0ran wrote:
| "they have come out and said what we knew all along: they only
| care about profits."
|
| Not the detract from the rest of the article, but - it's a
| company, what did you expect?
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm cynical, but most companies do have some scruples.
|
| Eg basic environmental care/policies or how they handle staff
| and customers.
| davedx wrote:
| It's a public utility, possibly with monopoly pricing power.
| There are other well known economic models around for managing
| public utilities, that mean profits don't get prioritised above
| everything else
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Okay I finally did this earlier this year too and it took quite a
| bit less than that. Started with impulse buy of invert at an
| online auction end of January. Installed last panels end of
| April. 3 months. Quite a bit of it was waiting for third parties
| or just me being lazy and not ordering parts I needed. I've
| wanted them for years beforehand so I did some research.
|
| For actual labor - it's about half days to install roof racks (I
| have shingle roof so quite a bit of time on angle grinder).
| Another half day to put panels on (requires 1 or more helpers),
| run a cable thru roof space. I've installed 12 panels on 2 facia.
|
| My hack was hiring electrician to install inverter so I can
| export to grid (I'm in New Zealand).
| BrtByte wrote:
| Funny how half the battle is just... remembering to order the
| right parts ahead of time
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Kinda by design. Didn't want to do shoddy things or have to
| re-do which means waiting and taking things slow.
| apexalpha wrote:
| > I found three companies and gave them my PG&E usage for the
| past year (about 16,000 kwh) and got three quotes ranging from
| ~45 -- 55k.
|
| Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe EUR10.000
| all-in here in the Netherlands.
|
| What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the
| ridiculous tarrifs?
|
| A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter +
| installation is EUR7000 now.
|
| And dropping, fast.
|
| Assuming batteries and PV come from China, someone in California
| is making _a lot_ of money or the government is straining the
| process with bureaucracy costing $30.000 per setup.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Prices were high even during the Biden administration.
|
| Markups due to subsidies are a part of it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Subsidy causing high prices? You're going to have to explain
| that.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| - Subsidy starts: prices drop.
|
| - Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again,
| maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise.
|
| - Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy
| levels.
|
| (Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you
| want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy
| government that plans on longer timescales.)
| apexalpha wrote:
| Sounds like a situation where there's not enough
| competition.
|
| the Netherlands had a net-metering subsidiy + good
| competition + frictionless install and as a result we
| have 3,5 solar panels _per person_ installed.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Or price fixing.
| genericresponse wrote:
| There are two more steps:
|
| - Demand drops due to increased price to buyers.
|
| - Prices drop so manufacturers can remain profitable.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Greed kicks in because capitalism
|
| There were no greedy people before capitalism. Of that we
| can be sure.
| komali2 wrote:
| Greed is a Bad attribute in basically every ethical
| system and religion throughout history.
|
| Capitalism, on the contrary, rewards it. The _best_ way
| to be under capitalism is greedy (sneakily so, if
| necessary).
|
| So yes, it is uniquely new to have a value system that
| rewards greed.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It doesn't reward greed, it rewards value. You could just
| as well say national borders reward invasions.
| ty6853 wrote:
| No, greed is a necessary component. Because under
| capitalism both parties don't execute the trade,
| rationally at least, unless both are greedily better off.
|
| Without greed it goes from a positive sum system to a
| destructive system because you no longer have the parties
| being better off from the transaction. From a cursory
| standpoint that might be ok (the economy won't implode if
| some small fraction does this like a minority of
| commercial activity being charity functions) but you
| basically lose most the information conveyed in prices
| and cost causing complete loss of productive allocation
| and it is an economic implosion.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Do note that nothing in this system incentivizes
| behaviour that creates societies that could last, say,
| several hundred years.
| jagger27 wrote:
| The perpetual existence of greed is not a good enough
| reason to structure all of society around that singular
| trait.
| empiko wrote:
| Customer is willing to pay 10k. Supplier will charge 10k.
|
| Customer is willing to pay 10k, state is willing to pay 5k.
| Supplier will charge 15k.
| ta1243 wrote:
| That applies with inelastic goods - land for example -
| where supply can't increase
|
| Assuming the base cost is 8k
|
| Supplier A and Supplier B charge 15k and have 100
| customers between them, making 350k each
|
| Supplier B decides to undercut Supplier A, and charge
| 14k, and get all the customers, making 600k profit
|
| Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two
| identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go
| for the 9k
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's
| two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll
| go for the 9k
|
| But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion
| where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and
| have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better
| marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher
| price in people's minds.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Only if you believe that the invisible hand of the market
| doesn't work
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm not sure government incentives allow the free market
| to do its work, then. Why would you think it would?
| ta1243 wrote:
| government incentives help to reduce the externalities
|
| You seem to think that two companies selling product A
| will rather sell 50 for $10 per unit profit than 100 for
| $9 per unit profit because it's easier.
|
| I mean, it's a view, sure.
| acatton wrote:
| There was a study in France showing that for rent
| subsidies.[1]
|
| In France, the state pays max(rate * rent, cap) for
| apartments for students, unemployed and poor workers.
| Usually people don't qualify for ratio of the rent, because
| it's way over the cap for the subsidy. To keep up with
| inflation, the state re-evaluate the cap of the subsidy
| almost every year.
|
| A french economist showed that there was a correlation
| between the cap of the rent subsidy and the rental market
| prices for small apartments. Of course, correlation is not
| causation, it could just be that the rental market follows
| the inflation as much as the cap. But this correlation
| doesn't happen for bigger and more luxurious appartments.
| Her explanation is that your poor household is only ready
| to afford EUR100 per month, as an example, the subsidy cap
| is EUR500, so the rental market prices these apartments to
| EUR600 (= 100 + 500). When the state re-evaluate the cap to
| EUR550, the rental market goes up to EUR650. (= 100 + 150)
|
| [1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/1376573/es
| 381-3...
| genericresponse wrote:
| The key difference in the markets is that it takes a very
| long time to build more apartments and houses, especially
| in France. There also isn't an option to not have
| housing. (Low elasticity) That keeps the short term
| supply effectively static. Same amount of supply,
| increase in money spent, inflation.
|
| In a market like solar, there is production of more solar
| systems. There are also multiple readily available
| substitutes. (e.g. on-grid power) The effect of the
| subsidy should drive increased volume from manufacturers,
| keeping net price stable.
| jandrese wrote:
| Costs are also high for solar installers in the US. It is a
| relatively dangerous job (on par with roofers) which makes
| health insurance premiums unaffordable. The permitting
| process is also quite onerous in a great many localities,
| involving multiple parties (your installer, the HOA, the
| city, the county, the power company) and multiple
| inspections. US installers also tend to provide generous
| warranty plans, 15 years parts and labor is typical, and have
| to make sure they have the capital to honor them. This is
| especially a problem as some solar hardware manufacturers
| have had some serious quality control issues, especially on
| the inverters, and have resulted in quite a lot more warranty
| work than was initially expected.
|
| The other issue was just plain pent-up demand. Installers
| could charge what they wanted because there weren't enough of
| them to go around, even as everybody and their dog started
| their own installer business. Many of those businesses were
| poorly run and have since gone under, leaving the homeowners
| high and dry when the inverter craps out and they're told by
| every other installer that they will not work on someone
| else's install and also told by the inverter manufacturer
| that if they attempt to replace the hardware themselves it
| will result in their warranty being voided.
| slavik81 wrote:
| For comparison, my 10 kW solar install completed last week cost
| 24k CAD (15k EUR). That's just panels, inverters and
| installation. The incremental cost was likely in part due to
| the ~160% tariffs on solar panels imposed by the Canadian
| government, but not all.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Ouch. My 7.8kW system fully installed was 13k CAD ( a bunch
| was DIY)
|
| Had it for a year now. Generated 7.7kWh which is worth $950.
| Took out natural gas, power bill for the entire year (heat
| pump, elec hot water) was $1000.
|
| Snowy mountain town in a tight valley in BC.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Crazy stuff. Ten years ago I paid PS5.5k GBP for a 3.7kW
| system. Since then I would expect the labour component to have
| gone up but the panels to have come down. I guess the skilled
| labour shortage in the US is having a very real effect on
| prices.
|
| Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that
| had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in
| England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway.
| However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid
| approval for that size of system.
| ty6853 wrote:
| There's not a shortage of skilled labor so much in US as
| there is a shortage of people able to go through the
| racketeering process of getting a contractor license, which
| also requires being a half-slave to someone with a license
| for a number of years. It's straight up mercantilist style
| shake-down to benefit prior entrants. It is easier in US to
| become an electrical engineer than it is to become a guy who
| adds a new outlet to a room addition, but that has nothing to
| do with skill.
|
| In fact when I was first hired as an engineer, it was
| actually someone that wanted an electrician but hired EEs
| instead because they are cheaper and more readily available.
|
| One of the worst is something like installing HVAC stuff. I
| got an EPA refrigerant license in 2 days of studying and then
| did my own myself. If I wanted to install it for a profit for
| someone else, I would have to spend 4 years working for
| someone else with a license first to get the contractor
| license! The end result is it legitimately cost like $700 to
| have a single capacitor replaced on an air conditioner, and
| in places like Florida if you do it for someone else without
| years of 'training' you're now a felon.
| bityard wrote:
| I always found solar farm engineering intensely interesting
| and looked seriously into becoming an electrician as a
| second career as something to "retire into" once I got sick
| of working in tech. And like you say, it turns out it's not
| something you can just make a lateral move into, no matter
| how quickly you can learn and how hard you're willing to
| study. "Becoming an electrician" is a young person's game.
| ty6853 wrote:
| There are a few places where you can work as an
| electrician without a license. Might be the same bumfuck
| places where solar or wind farms are. I think most of
| them are in the midwest or plain states.
|
| Where I live you can't but go figure you can become a
| licensed finish carpenter with a simple test.
|
| One loophole I looked I might look into some day is
| moving to another state with the least requirements for a
| license, then getting it, then transferring it to another
| state, which is allowed at least here.
| markvdb wrote:
| I see 7kEUR for 12kWp, retail, for a diy ground install set for
| our summer house. That's before 4kEUR in subsidies. No net
| metering, and feedin compensation is capped at 0.02EUR/kWh. But
| at 3kEUR net, who cares? Even with the low electricity rates
| here, this makes sense. Even for a summer house!
| bradfa wrote:
| In my town in NY state USA, they require a stamped
| engineering drawing for a ground mount system and it has to
| be rated for wind and snow load. Most of the ground mounts
| which come with stamped drawings have run about $1/W total
| cost which will meet my local needs for a set of panels in
| the 5kW to 20kW size range. This cost includes concrete, all
| support structure, and the racking that the panels attach to.
| This cost does not include panels, wiring, nor inverter.
|
| If you're able to get a 12kW rated full system, including
| racking, panels, and inverter for the equivalent of $1/W
| that's an amazing deal! I wish prices here were like that.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Batteries are dropping fast in price, but for the USA, they
| might be going up because of tariffs. Neatly sidestepping that:
|
| I have a powerwall 2 with 5kw panels, which I've had since
| about 2021. At the time it was the biggest, cheapest, had a
| grid isolation mode, and could be mounted outside. (I didn't
| trust tesla back then, and I sure as shit don't now. Moreover,
| once it catches fire, that shit aint going out anytime soon)
|
| It still cost about PS7k installed.
|
| From about march/april to end of october, we are power
| sufficient (london, even with rainy days, gas hot water
| though.)
|
| If I were to get a new system, 13kwhr of battery is something
| like PS2k, plus inverter/charger.
|
| The panels are dirt cheap, to the point where the scaffolding
| costs more than the panels. (and the mounts.)
| deadfoxygrandpa wrote:
| and now you know why america's GDP is so high
| ty6853 wrote:
| In USA, as a general off the cuff that may be wrong, DIY prices
| is generally ~1/3 of contractor price.
|
| A $45k quote would correspond roughly to 14k euro of materials.
| dbetteridge wrote:
| Similarly in Australia I recently paid about $10k AUD (after
| subsidies) for 13kw of panels and a 10kw inverter.
|
| New subsidies this year for batteries mean I can get a 15kwh
| battery installed for around 2-3k AUD
| gdubs wrote:
| I posted above about the price because when we've gotten quotes
| - and this is over a year back - they were really high! Not
| sure what the deal is because the graphs all show the cost of
| green electricity cratering; but somehow on the residential
| side of things here in the U.S - even in rural areas with very
| relaxed restrictions - it's super pricey!
| louwrentius wrote:
| This solar installation is quite large and quite expensive.
|
| There is a whole cottage industry of DIY 48V 15kWh batteries
| based on LFP prismatic cells (16x) and special battery case
| resulting a price of around 1500 Euro for 15 kWh.
|
| A DIY setup is quite doable, Deye (EG4) or Victron make suitable
| inverters.
|
| The continuous 1 kW power draw I find Ludicrous, probably
| especially as a European. I would realy rethink what is
| absolutely necessary. Huge data storage was my hobby but the
| storage server is only turned on when required, saves a lot of
| power.
| meitham wrote:
| forget the technology, what is that gorgeous snake-like plant in
| the picture by the blue stairs? I need that
| elmolino89 wrote:
| Not sure if the identification by the PlantNet is the correct
| one, but you may check [1]Asparagus aethiopicus
|
| 1 https://www.backyardboss.net/asparagus-fern-guide/
| meitham wrote:
| Thank you, I think that's the one!
| elmolino89 wrote:
| If you like the general shape you may look into various
| Echium species. Echium wildpretii is just stunning.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| Guy claims he's tired of paying for electricity because of the
| "ludacris" (sic) costs so he's going to "DIY". Yet, first thing
| he does is pay a guy to do it.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Yeah but come on, there's a big difference between paying
| someone to design plans vs handing over the whole project to a
| solar installer
| lvturner wrote:
| capex vs opex
| Mawr wrote:
| Yeah. He didn't even mine the lithium for his batteries
| himself, what a sham.
| cyri wrote:
| I did build my own solar system too. In Switzerland.
|
| Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone
| nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware
| from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24
| panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it
| was a bit better.
|
| I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge
| inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP
| battery.
|
| All prices without state funding: Offers from local installers
| for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
|
| I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated
| with building it.
|
| Should write a blog post about it :-)
|
| Next project is a solar fence with 6kWp.
| pingou wrote:
| What do you do with that much electricity? Was it necessary to
| over-dimension for winter?
| yvan wrote:
| If you have an EV that can be charged only at night, a big
| battery is required.
| cyri wrote:
| For solar excess charging I use evcc.io
|
| When I charge the car via battery then only down to ~75%
| for now. The remaining energy is needed by the house during
| winter months.
| raphael_l wrote:
| I would also be interested in the reasoning here!
|
| Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH
| battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr.
| ~EUR11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the
| total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was
| done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also
| couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much
| experience as the dog next door).
|
| If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the
| panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to
| 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered
| better, as our production is really low as we have a 10deg
| flat roof installation.
| cyri wrote:
| Of course it is a bit oversized.
|
| We're living in a big river valley where we have fog from
| October until March. On some days in November the fog is so
| dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of
| energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to
| charge the battery.
|
| We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric
| car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year.
| The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy
| gets fed back into the grid.
|
| We're currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses
| physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(
| amenghra wrote:
| FYI: Neighborhood-level connections are changing starting
| next January (look up RCP and CEL).
| butshouldyou wrote:
| They're in Switzerland.
| amenghra wrote:
| Yes, how neighborhood-level connections are setup in
| Switzerland is changing next year.
|
| See eg
| https://www.swissolar.ch/fr/connaissances/nouvelle-loi-
| sur-l... (post written in French)
| kragen wrote:
| How much did you pay for the panels, and what's your capacity
| factor? (Kilowatt hours produced on average per nominal peak
| kilowatt.)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Great to see DIY early adopters getting great savings here. I
| think the bigger trend here is lower cost, commoditization, and
| it eventually becoming a no-brainer for people that have the
| opportunity/space to be running their own micro grids for cost
| reasons. The cost of what you need here is still quite high. But
| making things easier to plug together helps. And of course
| component cost is coming down.
|
| For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or
| boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put
| on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here
| in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket.
| They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and
| play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of
| these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
|
| I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is
| not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than
| what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below
| 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get
| a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't
| break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around
| 200$.
|
| Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the
| component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost,
| certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you
| end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term
| both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the
| exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will
| become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work
| yourself.
| speedbird wrote:
| Am interested in the DC-AC--DC- Battery-AC vs DC-DC-Battery-AC
| efficiency argument. As in there must be a DC-DC conversion
| happening to charge batteries appropriately.
| davedx wrote:
| Stepping voltage up or down isnt as lossy (or expensive) as
| converting from AC<->DC
| rssoconnor wrote:
| As someone not into electronics, can you explain how that
| works. I'm only familiar with transformers which, of course,
| require AC?
| aa-jv wrote:
| I have a minor interest in this subject as well, and after some
| thinking I realized that my personal solar interests are best
| served by electro-mechanical harvesting of solar energy, first
| and foremost .. since a full-blown EV solar rig would require the
| purchase of components I cannot myself personally make very
| easily.
|
| This summer I'm building a solar oven to cook bread and veggies
| with .. and if this works well, I'll build a solar death ray to
| play with while I wait for lunch.
|
| It seems to me that this is a potential route for the
| popularization of off-grid/local-energy-harvesting movements to
| gain more traction. Sure, its nice to have a whole roof full of
| PV panels and a battery bank to sip juice from now and then, but
| this still requires a heavy investment in foreign-originated
| parts and materials.
|
| A solar oven/solar death ray, however, is a lot more feasible to
| produce locally.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I have a solar system in my house in london. 5kw, 13kwhr battery.
| I am self sufficient from end of march to october.
|
| I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug
| (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD
| and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking PS600)
|
| It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess
| solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without draining
| the house battery. Its fine for me, because I have Home
| Assistant, with enough fiddling I can get all the systems to talk
| to each other to play ball. (to add to the complication, I'm on a
| variable rate tariff, so price can be negative or PS1 a kwhr)
|
| I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a
| "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the
| things in a house. Because at the moment, a "normal" person
| wouldn't be able to charge their car and have house batteries and
| have solar, and optimise for cost.
| epiecs wrote:
| If your electrical installation allows it: You can connect your
| ev plug before the battery so that it does not drain the
| battery. You can do this by placing the fuse/connection before
| the measurement clamps for the battery. Somewhere in between
| your mains connection and your battery/solar system.
|
| This way the battery does not see the load and does not provide
| power to your EV.
|
| That way you can still use excess solar (before you inject it
| into the mains) to charge your car + you do not pull power from
| your battery :)
| KaiserPro wrote:
| The ideal solution is for the battery to have a third set of
| clamps to measure the EV. But as I don't have installer
| access to the software (centrally managed for the win) I'm
| not sure thats possible.
|
| I might ask to see if thats possible. I probably need more
| panels to cover the winter load.
| metalman wrote:
| Midnight Solar are the OG company in off grid and they have a
| "waste not" feature from way back that triggers any device when
| the parameters you set are reached, ie: float voltage, and/or
| other things, like a second set point where power would be sent
| to a third load, like the grid or water heating.
| https://www.midnitesolar.com/ hard core techies, even had the
| pleasure of detailing my inadvertant and unsucessfull attempts
| to melt one of there controlers.......literaly had a main lug
| get loose, and the panels arc melted the lug to slag, and it
| lived. in any case, there web site has a wealth of info on what
| is possible, and to look for elsewhere
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Midnite Classics are great... But the web APIs seem to be
| deprecated. Do you know of any tools that can get data off
| them?
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _no way is that worth fucking PS600)_
|
| Liability coverage, and UL certification (or UK/EU equivalent),
| for the company is. Though see perhaps:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEVSE
|
| > _I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a
| "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the
| things in a house._
|
| With regards to EV and the grid, see perhaps:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118
|
| * Also: https://www.ampcontrol.io/post/what-are-ocpp-
| iec-63110-iso-1...
|
| For an (industrial) electrical communication protocol, perhaps:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61850
| philjohn wrote:
| I mean, it's a bit more than a contactor and an RCD, it also
| has PEN fault detection because TN-C-S is how most of us are
| wired up to the grid.
|
| Then for use with smart tariffs like IOG there's a
| microcontroller, cloud gateway for them to hook into for OCCP
| to turn on and off the charger when the grid is
| cheapest/greenest etc.
|
| So PS600 is about right, once you add in R&D, certification,
| profit margin, warranty claim % etc.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Then for use with smart tariffs
|
| I wish it had all of that. I would actually pay for that. The
| Zappi from myenergi promises much but fails to deliver.
| philjohn wrote:
| That's odd - I've got the Zappi and it works perfectly with
| Intelligent Octopus Go. Plug the car in, have a
| HomeAssistant automation that detects this and sets the
| "charge to add" on Octopus and enjoy the car being charged
| the next morning.
|
| I always recommend hardwiring it though, rather than
| relying on Wifi through a brick wall.
| bencyoung wrote:
| We have https://www.myenergi.com/ for our car charger and it
| seems to be able to integrate batteries, charging and panels
| like you suggest, only you have to go all in. We have parts of
| it and are tempted to use more, but the lock-in angle is a bit
| off-putting
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Yeah I have a Zappi, but as you know its got no local API,
| and it doesn't like getting warm. However it _cant_ control
| my battery directly, because its made by tesla. (I mean thats
| also my fault....)
|
| I have also heard that if you go all in it works much better.
| It does have the nice feature of diverting to other devices
| instead of the grid, and giving priority to certain devices.
| belorn wrote:
| Would be interesting to know how London compare to Sweden.
| Electricity here are generally about twice to four times more
| expensive during the winter than during the summer, and energy
| consumption is about twice the amount during winter compared to
| summer. On average people here spend around 75% of the total
| energy bill during winter.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If your rates can go negative you should be charging the car
| and house batteries at that time if possible and then selling
| back to the grid at peak times. Does your home assistant get
| real-time rate data and can it facilitate that?
| venamresm__ wrote:
| We also setup our own off-grid solar system, almost 4 years ago
| now. The cost was much lower due to lower import fees and lack of
| regulations where I live, it was altogether somewhere between
| $3-4k total, for 16 panels, mounting rack, inverter (with backup
| inverter), mptt, 12 acid-lead batteries, etc.. We saved so much
| money, and fewer headaches, since state electricity only came
| around 5-6h a day and people relied on scammy-mafia generator
| providers that ask for insane prices.
| thefz wrote:
| > I have a rack in the garage that pulls a little less than 1kw.
| That's 1kw 24/7/365
|
| This is insane. And here I am shutting down nightly the drives in
| my synology to save 20W.
| sponaugle wrote:
| Hold my beer!
| bmqpo wrote:
| With power issues in Nigeria (basically no power from my
| perspective), I have been building my home solar system.
| Currently at 9kw solar panels, 10kva inverter with 30kwh Chinese
| LFP. Spent about $7,000 so far. Looking to eventually get to
| 60kwh and at least 20kw in panels because of air conditioning
| needs.
|
| Waiting for government, my kids currently in primary school would
| probably have graduated from college before they fix the power
| situation (they are currently fixated on building roads to
| nowhere).
| growt wrote:
| I missed the "power" when I skimmed the headline and clicked the
| link. I was slightly dissapointed when I finally realised that
| the OP is in fact not building his own solar system.
| K0balt wrote:
| I've been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the
| last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4
| panels, these days we're powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water
| extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber
| network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a
| small server rack.
|
| We're running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase
| configuration, 35kw of panels and 160kwh of lithium iron
| batteries. About to add an additional 20kw of panels and a test
| bank of LiTo cells.
|
| Our panels are a distributed set of rooftop mounted panels on
| various buildings, which also serves to shade the rooftops
| reducing cooling loads.
|
| We still have to run a generator to supplement charging on dark
| overcast days, but it's typically about 100 hours a year. Hooping
| to get that running on biomass eventually.
|
| It's strange to me that people in rural areas pay for
| electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the
| Caribbean.
| account-5 wrote:
| Would imagine it's the initial cost of seeing all that up, and
| then the cost of maintenance. For me personally, where do you
| even start?
| K0balt wrote:
| It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really,
| except when we decided to build a building for The power
| plant because it was getting out of hand. It's been a few
| thousand dollars a year in growth as we add batteries and
| panels. Also a bit of labor for installation of course, but
| we handle that in house.
| boringg wrote:
| How much are you valuing your own time? Theres money cost,
| then theres time cost and the final one is in more remote
| communities with cold weather... insurance costs on
| failure...
|
| Also to be clear - good on you for building out rural off
| grid electrical. Its a fun project and satisfying no doubt
| (outaide of costa)
| Moto7451 wrote:
| I don't know the OP's situation but I've seen that many
| coffee growers have to do this because in high altitude
| tropical areas there is simply no one who will do the
| work anyway. They also have a very different regulatory
| structure in practice to what we have in the continental
| US and Europe.
|
| I've spoken to people from Rural Georgia (which is about
| an hour from Atlanta depending on the direction you're
| driving) in Microcenter that are usually there to wire up
| their farm or factory with sufficient network capacity to
| keep production rolling. They have mentioned that they
| have had to do their own trenching for last mile for
| various services. Sometimes that means they literally
| drive down to Herc rentals, pick up a trenching machine,
| and do it themselves since the wait for someone else to
| do it is months away and that's a long time if your
| business needs internet, water, power, etc.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It grew organically so there was never a huge cost
| Really,
|
| Ahh, the accounting style of hobby projects. I'm very
| familiar with this because I do it, too.
|
| Nothing ever feels expensive if you just never add it all
| up and value your time at $0 because it's fun.
| K0balt wrote:
| The total cost of the system so far is about $87k, and
| operating cost is around 4000 a year (includes equipment
| amortisation, slow expansion, direct operating costs). In
| all, for several homes, and a farm it's very affordable.
| Getting power hooked up to a single house from the
| utilities is about $9000, so our buildout is roughly 2x
| what we might have spent just to get hooked up to the
| grid.
|
| We do buy carefully, and all the engineering is done by
| me. We have employees on the farm so much of the labor of
| installing underground cable etc was "free" (lol).
|
| Still, we are miles ahead of our costs if we were hooked
| up to the grid (which also would have cost us an
| additional $20k just for poles to get close, and we still
| would have had to bury the cables on campus along with
| the water and data, if we didn't want ugly poles all
| over, so that part is a wash)
|
| I spend about 4 hours a week on utilities based projects,
| mostly engineering monitoring and control systems so that
| I spend less time working on the utilities. (So, futzing
| around with electronics because I have an excuse to) it
| feels like meaningful work that I care about, so that's
| nice.
| BubbleRings wrote:
| Thank you so much for these posts! It makes me very
| optimistic about the future.
|
| For the longest time we all watched from the sidelines,
| hoping that the desire to turn off coal-fired power
| plants, and research often funded by tax dollars, would
| get the ball moving on solar. Now that the market has its
| magic invisible hand on that ball, it seems clear to me
| we have a path out of this mess.
|
| Rant your stupid "drill baby drill" crap all you want
| magats, we are going to solar, wind, and fusion our way
| to a better world, and there is nothing you can do to
| stop us.
| aftbit wrote:
| Fission first! Let's build more nuclear power plants too.
| We know how to do it, and it's only so expensive because
| we got scared and stopped. Economies of scale for clean,
| safe, reliable baseload power.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Turns out, I'm already on fission.
|
| What I've done is tap into an existing fission reactor.
| It's some distance from my house, but there's a lot of
| excess energy there leaking out. I put up some collectors
| to capture it.
|
| Was really quite cheap to do, and I don't have to pay
| anyone to actually run the reactor.
| tmtvl wrote:
| Greens here in Europe often complain about nuclear
| reactors and I just don't have the heart to tell them.
| strawhatguy wrote:
| That's silly, why make it political? If anything the
| political encroachment came from the green crowd first,
| cafe standards, EV mandates and the like.
|
| The best way forward has always been to explore all
| energy avenues, and that will include fossil fuels as
| well. At least you've included nuclear, but left out
| fission, strangely, which is the best hope of electric
| generation replacement we currently have.
|
| I'm tired of this team blue for electric (except Tesla
| now, lol) and team red for oil. They are choices with
| trade offs, and are friends, not enemies.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| No offence, but everything is political. Much of our
| lives are controlled by laws. These laws are all
| politically controlled. To say it's silly to make
| something political, usually suggests your supported
| political slant is difficult to justify. Trade offs are
| only possible when the party in charge is willing to work
| with EVERYONE, we don't have that now. Thus the
| criticism.
| bityard wrote:
| That sounds incredible. This is the first year I've
| really started digging deep into solar generation and
| battery storage and it's one big fascinating rabbit hole.
|
| I've looked at it from a bunch of different angles and
| keep coming to the conclusion that for rural and suburban
| areas with the space for panels, off-grid solar is the
| future.
| darkwater wrote:
| > and value your time at $0 because it's fun.
|
| I don't know if you were being ironic or not but...
| that's an absolute truth. Our free time doesn't have a
| fixed rate. It doesn't have a rate _at all_. What you do
| during free time can be basically seen as either:
|
| * a chore you don't like to do
|
| * something you like to do.
|
| Any task can swing between those states depending on your
| mood. If installing your own solar plant or self-host
| your server rack (as OP is doing) is something you enjoy
| doing, then yes, it costs exactly $0 in labor.
| thedanbob wrote:
| Agreed. I get asked to repair electronics for people
| quite often and I charge drastically differently for
| labor depending on whether I will enjoy the job or not.
| jedahan wrote:
| Would love a write up or links to resources for water
| extraction and treatment if you'd oblige.
| K0balt wrote:
| I don't have much in the way of links, but I can give you an
| overview.
|
| We have a fair bit of vertical scale in the terrain here. We
| extract our water from a shallow well in a natural crevasse
| between ridges. It is made of concrete blocks stacked in a
| circle, filled with gravel and pinned with heavy rebar. The
| above ground part is finished in a regular fashion, with the
| blocks filled with concrete and a concrete cap. The well is
| built of a circle of 12 blocks, and is about 16 feet deep-
| where we encountered hard bedrock. An underground stream
| flows over this bedrock, which we extract from.
|
| This raw water is pumped to a 300 gallon manifold tank about
| 160 feet above the extraction point using a 1HP centrifugal
| pump. From there, it flows down to the processing facility,
| where it is sediment and carbon filtered before flowing into
| either the 2600 gallon cistern, or back up the hill a bit to
| a 450 gallon upper campus distribution tank. Water passing
| through the processing facility is filtered and chlorinated,
| with the exception of the upper campus water, which is only
| filtered.
|
| The upper campus water flows to cabins in the upper campus,
| and also serves as the input water for the RO system. The RO
| source water is pressurised by another centrifugal pump to
| 70psi, and is fed through a pair of 150GPD membranes after
| being filtered to 1 micron and passed through another carbon
| block. We run a 4:1 "waste" ratio to give us good life on the
| membranes (typically a year). The mineral rich "brine" flows
| into the 2600 gallon cistern and is used in the regular
| water.
|
| We warehouse the drinking water in a 500-gallon tank at the
| processing facility.
|
| There is a dual distribution system for water on campus. From
| the cistern at the processing facility RO water and regular
| water flows through underground tubing to a network of 5
| utility huts where it is distributed to various homes and
| outbuildings. Each building then passes the main water
| through another carbon block to catch chemicals and chlorine,
| and drinking water gets mineralization and carbon again at
| the point of use.
|
| The underground distribution network also carries 3 phase
| power, HVDC for solar, separate fiber optic networks for
| security, control, intranet, and ISP, as well as cat6 cables
| for RS485 control subsystems. The tank levels, pump controls,
| power distribution and usage monitoring, emergency and
| automatic casualty control shutoffs, etc are all operated
| over rs485 and modbusTCP to a server. It's a lot of off the
| shelf stuff and some custom stuff that i have built. Someday
| I need to do a write up on that lol.
|
| Anyway, that's the view from space.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| This is cool as hell. Sounds like you keep pretty busy, but
| if you ever had the inclination to write more about it or
| post some pictures somewhere, I for one would love to see.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It's strange to me that people in rural areas pay for
| electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the
| Caribbean.
|
| This comment was very confusing until I read the second
| sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high,
| and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse.
|
| Where I'm at in the United States a typical electric rate is
| around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the
| need to service additional equipment and deal with backup
| generators is an easy decision.
| nullpoint420 wrote:
| I'm jealous. Where I live in California the off peak rate is
| $0.32/kWh and peak rates are $0.58/kWh.
| Loughla wrote:
| Rural area power co-op member here - flat rate 24/7 for
| residential is .13/kWh. Businesses/farms can get down to
| .10/kWh if they qualify.
|
| They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees
| around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the
| co-op members as unnecessary.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim
| trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied
| by the co-op members as unnecessary.
|
| Pge felt the same way and it did t turn out so well for
| them. I hope your coop is never found to be at fault for
| the next record breaking fire...
| Loughla wrote:
| So the increase was to buy spray equipment to attach to a
| helicopter. And a helicopter. One of the co-op ex-board
| members' son recently moved back to the area and had his
| license. . . It was a shameless cash grab by that family
| and was rightfully voted down by a wild majority of the
| co-op members. Every member of the board was replaced
| within 2 years of them proposing the increase as well.
|
| They currently keep all the lines clear via bucket
| trucks, and when they spray, they use ATV's and trucks.
| It takes most of June to spray all the lines, but they
| get it done easily.
|
| The actual physical infrastructure has been replaced
| almost entirely in the last 10 years through federal
| and/or state grants in combination with income from power
| charges.
|
| Also, these are just fundamentally different entities.
| PGE is a private entity that operates for a profit. Our
| power company is a co-op owned and run by its members. If
| they have any profit at the end of the year (once
| infrastructure improvements and safety net investments
| are paid for), the money gets paid directly back to the
| co-op members. It's a WILDLY different incentive
| structure.
| coryrc wrote:
| Not every place is built in a dry forest which
| traditionally burned regularly but the current
| infrastructure is built around never burning. The only
| risk in, say, Michigan, is the power going out at
| inopportune times.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| If that's considered high, I'm just not going to say what
| it costs in the Caribbean.
|
| At least where I was.
| Evidlo wrote:
| $0.08/kWh here for central Illinois
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Taxes and supply charges are what take it from cheap to
| expensive in Illinois.
| robohoe wrote:
| Yep, and we have 5 nuke power plants in vicinity
| horacemorace wrote:
| Doesn't that sort of rate make the payoff for a solar
| system install just a few years?
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Yeah - even with PGE trying their best to screw over
| solar customers in the last few years, I figure we've at
| least gotten our money back in ~15 years of owning a ~4KW
| system. Something like 75 MW generated in that time,
| assuming the inverter is more-or-less correct. At this
| point, doesn't make any sense anymore, since they only
| credit you like $0.1 and charge you $0.6 (I haven't
| looked too closely at it) - you'd have to generate 5-10x
| your consumption to mostly offset it.
|
| We bought ours in '10 to offset high AC use in the summer
| - we were paying $1000-1500 a month for 2-4 months in the
| summer. The first few years, our "year-end" balance was <
| $1K (we just paid minimum payments the rest of the year),
| so I figure we easily saved $2-3K/year in those early
| years, and after the incentives in those days, we paid
| ~$14K, so maybe 7 years to pay it off. Our year-end
| balance was more like $3K the last time, and I think
| we're still producing 80-90% the same power, but PGE
| keeps changing the plans around. At this point, I'm
| interested in upgrading our cells from 300W to 450W, but
| I'd only do that with a battery system that also stores
| energy so that we could go more or less entirely off-
| grid. But probably need a new roof first..
| supportengineer wrote:
| I'm in the Bay Area - Off peak is 0.44 and peak is 0.48
|
| Separately for "clean power", Off peak is 0.13 and peak is
| 0.17
|
| So that's a combined 0.57 and 0.65
| w10-1 wrote:
| > I'm jealous. Where I live in California the off peak rate
| is $0.32/kWh and peak rates are $0.58/kWh.
|
| My California rates are .50/63 off/on peak
|
| "Jealous" is not the term I'd use...
| Moto7451 wrote:
| You're in a good part of the country for grid power. I'm in
| Georgia where the typical rate is about 14 cents but summer
| rates are more like 18. Summer rates aren't captured in this
| EIA chart but you can see the whole country. With summer
| rates and high energy use for cooling and dehumidification
| it's a 7-8 year payback for a 13kW DC/10kW AC system.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph.
| ..
| gramie wrote:
| In Quebec, I'm paying $0.069/kWh or USD $0.05/kWh
| (hydroelectric, so already green), so it's hard to make a
| case for solar.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > hydroelectric, so already green
|
| Not so fast. Zero emissions, yeah. But they have damaged
| the habitat for some bird species.
| aplummer wrote:
| Feral cats kill 2 billion birds a year, FYI the green
| energy kills birds thing is a right wing talking point
| designed to distract and delay. All human activity kills
| some nominal number of birds
| RajT88 wrote:
| Indeed. They care about the environment when pretending
| to do so lets them fight against things which are
| actually good for the environment and bad for the fossil
| fuel industry.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Would love to see your analysis of Thanksgiving
| nine_k wrote:
| A colossal positive impact, with the population of the
| turkeys skyrocketing.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| $0.10 kwh is low for most of the US. Can I guess.... Western
| state or PNW?
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Over here in PA I pay $0.095, so nine and a half cents, per
| KWh for electric supply, but then I pay that same amount
| for transmission, so it's functionally 19 cents per KWh,
| but maybe the person you're replying to isn't counting
| transmission fees?
| brewtide wrote:
| Similar here in Maine under CMP. Something like 12.5
| cents/Kwh, but with the delivery aspect factored in it's
| basically 28 cents/Kwh.
|
| I always assume when people on here are talking their
| 'rates', that they are usually NOT factoring in the
| delivery fee unless stated.
|
| But maybe some places are just really THAT cheap.
| ploxiln wrote:
| I don't know why anyone would _not_ include the
| "delivery" fee, I think it really is that cheap in many
| places in the US.
|
| Here in NYC the "supply" charge is much less than half of
| the total bill. If I add up all the fees and surcharges
| and taxes etc, the total ends up around 35 cents / KWh,
| which I thought was rather high until I heard about
| California ...
| philipkglass wrote:
| I pay 11.6 cents per kilowatt hour inclusive of
| everything (taxes too). My household used 647 kilowatt
| hours in April and the bill for the month was $75.02. The
| per-unit charge neglecting taxes and delivery is only 7.4
| cents. This is in Washington state.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| why would you not include the transmission? residential
| customers just pay one bill and that's including the
| lines, maintenance.
|
| In western states such as Oregon, Washington, it is
| actually 0.12KWH including transmission.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I'm in the Canadian prairies and we pay a similar electric
| rate. It's funny though...
|
| > avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal
| with backup generators is an easy decision.
|
| We've got a house in a very small town (pop. 100) and there
| are solar panels on a ton of the houses there. I've asked a
| few people about it and it's 100% for grid redundancy. Sure,
| they save a bit of money on their power bill, but they're
| basically using the panels and batteries as an alternative to
| a backup generator. Winters are quite cold here and having
| enough power to run the natural-gas-fired furnace and a few
| light bulbs is a huge win when the power inevitably goes out.
| Lots of people have small generators kicking around too (like
| the Honda EU2200 that RV folks love) but the solar install
| has seriously cut down on the need for those.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Where in the Caribbean?
| thebiss wrote:
| What is your recovery plan in the event of a hurricane?
|
| I'm not fond of high electric rates, but in addition to
| generation those rates amortize and distribute the cost of
| storm recovery. A home or business with grid-tied solar pays
| interconnect fees for the option to get paid back a little for
| excess generation, and the option to decide to switch back to
| 100% grid power if a storm damages the on-site panels.
| gopalv wrote:
| > those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm
| recovery
|
| Not exactly when it is a farm out there away from a town.
|
| My experience is from a different era (90s) and a different
| kind of farm, but I spent a bunch of summers in one, which
| had power outages whenever the monsoons picked up.
|
| The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the farm
| from about 6km away, so if that went down a single farmowner
| complained - the rate payers who were in a denser urban area
| always got priority, because there were 600+ people who
| shared a transformer.
|
| The generator ran a lot when winds knocked power out, but the
| generator only ran when there was a big power need like
| running the well pumps or one of the winnowing mills. Even
| the winnower had pedals, because work doesn't stop.
|
| Every bathroom had a light with a 30 minute battery in it,
| which came on when the power went out - I guess if they had
| LEDs those same batteries would be 6 hour lights.
|
| They would have killed for solar + storage, because shipping
| fuel in for the generator was one of those annoying things
| you had to keep doing over and over again.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the
| farm from about 6km away, so if that went down a single
| farmowner complained - the rate payers who were in a denser
| urban area always got priority, because there were 600+
| people who shared a transformer.
|
| The urban rate payers also subsidize the rural ones, so it
| makes sense that they'd be front of the line.
| rz2k wrote:
| After a hurricane, the plan might be to help neighbors charge
| their phones, or sell electricity to telcos to power their
| networks switches and cell towers.
|
| I think I am much less remote than the poster, and I can
| easily lose power for a week or more after a winter storm.
| Considering that they already have generators on site that
| can manage the full load, they probably have much better up
| time than the utility electricity provider.
| roflyear wrote:
| What's your farm? How can someone reach out to buy small
| amounts of coffee from you, say 2-3 70kg bags?
| sgt wrote:
| Where will the drop be?
| roflyear wrote:
| You mean roaster? ceto.coffee
| rz2k wrote:
| How has your experience been with the lithium-titanium-oxide
| batteries? Everything I read makes it sound like the optimal
| solution for safety and long life, but it doesn't seem like
| they have displaced other battery chemistries very much.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| For the US, the entire user base helps subsidize rural
| customers. I have recently had the thought that I'm curious how
| this subsidy compares to the price of creating local micro-
| grids for rural communities. Especially in places like
| California where it is long distance power lines running to
| rural communities that have started several major fires.
|
| I don't have the skill to do it myself, but I'd love to see an
| analysis of whether it would make more sense at this point to
| do solar/wind + batteries and backup generators for at least
| the smallest and most remote communities.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Australia has just completed 5 years of feasibility studies
| on this:
|
| https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/regional-remote-
| co...
|
| and moved to the pilot phase:
|
| https://arena.gov.au/funding/rmp/
|
| A review of some of the feasability studies carried out in
| phase one:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962.
| ..
| jhfdbkofdchk wrote:
| reminds me of that Hunter S. Thompson quote from Fear and
| Loathing in Las Vegas, "Not that we needed all that for the
| trip, but once you get locked into a serious [solar power
| setup], the tendency is to push it as far as you can.""
| networkisfine wrote:
| Very interesting. I'm looking to do something very similar on a
| farm.
|
| Would you mind sharing some more design details?
|
| Questions that come to mind: What products are you using? Are
| you doing any AC-coupling between inverters? If not, are you
| just running your PV wires between buildings? Are you stepping
| up your AC voltages to 480v or so to cover greater distances
| with less loss? Thanks!
| arwineap wrote:
| Naive question, why run inverters?
|
| Wouldn't it be more efficient to run direct DC appliances?
|
| We have a building on our farm without power and it'd be ideal
| to be able to charge batteries and run lights at night
|
| It seems to me that we would have to upsize batteries in order
| to make up for the loss in converting to AC
| belval wrote:
| > Dumb question, why run inverters?
|
| Can't say for OP, but DC appliances are just difficult to
| find, usually more expensive due to economies of scale and
| not as uniform in voltage (12/24/48V) as AC appliances. If
| your battery is in a shed somewhere it's also much easier to
| run a smaller gauge AC wire than setup distribution for your
| DC power.
|
| Most large system are also 48V so you need to get it down to
| 12/24V which adds components anyway, at which point you might
| as well just have an inverter and not worry about any of
| that.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You also need some sort of battery management, and
| inverters typically have this built in as well.
|
| So yeah, you can get by without an inverter, but then you
| need a battery charger manager so as not to overcharge, and
| (depending on the battery chemistry) something to cut off
| the battery as it runs down. (Lead acid for example
| shouldn't go below 50%).
| vhanda wrote:
| Not who you're asking.
|
| I really don't see why we're still using A/C inside our
| houses / apartments. I understand that the transmission loss
| is lower when sending A/C, so it makes sense, but then nearly
| every device in my house has their own AC to DC converter.
| Just have one AC-DC converter per building.
|
| I'd like the future to just be USB-C sockets in my house. We
| have USB-C PD 3.1 which supports up to 48v, I imagine that
| would be good for _all_ devices.
|
| There are probably safety reasons why this future might be
| difficult.
| bityard wrote:
| That would have been a good argument to make a decade or
| two ago but these days switch-mode power supplies are very
| efficient, and GaN ones even more so.
|
| I have a small mess of 12-ish volt computer/network
| equipment in the corner of my office and looked into
| running it all off of one $40 high-amp power supply to
| eliminate all the wall warts and bricks. By the time I
| figured out power distribution and termination, buck/boost
| converters for the things that aren't 12V, it all seemed
| like a lot of work compared to just spending a couple hours
| tidying up the cabling and hiding the wall warts.
|
| You can live in the future now and install power outlets
| with USB-PD built right in, although a quick glance
| suggests they top out at 65W. Fine for phones and tablets,
| might not keep a gaming laptop charged while in use.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| This sounds awesome!
|
| Do you have a tech blog or writeup on what things you used,
| what parts broke down, or what kind of things needed to be
| fixed over time?
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I'm in Texas and designed our own solar+battery setup in '21. I
| had an installer handle that bit and the interconnect though. I
| found the "secret" was the to leave room for expansion.
|
| In Texas, residential grid-tied solar can be up to 20kWh so I
| chose cells that got me to 19.96kWh
|
| Then I added an 2 _9kWh battery stacks (18kWh total) but each
| stack could go to 18kWh (36kWh total). Then I also used a pair of
| Generac inverters which lets me get two more stacks for 72kWh
| total.
|
| My goal was resiliency, not sufficiency, so I use it grid-tied so
| I charge during the day and use at night. When there are storms
| coming, I flip it to "priority backup" which will prioritize
| charging.. even using the grid to do it if there's not enough
| sun.
|
| Anyway, it's been in production since January '22 and my _annual*
| electric bill is ~$1100. Even better, when we have an outage
| (occasional as we live in a heavily wooded area) if our stack is
| full, we have ~5 days of battery backup for the fridge, a handful
| of appliances, and our Starlink.. therefore we have safe food
| storage, safe food prep, and non-terrestrial communications.
|
| Of course, this cost ~$80k to get there in 2021 (aka before crazy
| inflation)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Anyway, it's been in production since January '22 and my
| annual* electric bill is ~$1100.
|
| A more helpful comparison would be to see your electricity bill
| before and after.
|
| For comparison, I'm in an area with low electricity rates and I
| don't run A/C at the level of someone in a Texas climate. My
| annual electricity bill is barely higher than yours but I don't
| have any solar at all. Absolute electricity bill numbers don't
| translate well.
| ctkhn wrote:
| Saving this for when my parents moves - they're on NEM 1 and will
| freak at the rates for a new solar install. Right now the excess
| power goes to an EV and then the grid since the power
| import/export rates are almost 1:1 but after the move these in
| home batteries are going to be crucial.
| heytakeiteasy wrote:
| Great writeup! Seems bizarre to have a furnace in the Bay Area.
| Air-source heat pumps and heat pump water heaters are fantastic
| these days.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Imagine if America didn't have any tarrifs or constrains on
| Chinese advanced goods like EV cars and Solar Panels.
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| >We can't all live in SF
|
| Thanks to California zoning
| breakds wrote:
| Wow, what a fantastic write-up--thanks for sharing this! I'm a
| San Jose homeowner (and PG&E sufferer) with a homelab that pulls
| over 1 kW, and I've been down the DIY solar rabbit hole for the
| past two weeks. Based on my research, I'm planning a roughly 9 kW
| Signature Solar setup:
|
| 20x 455 W Canadian Solar panels (~$173 ea)
|
| 1x GridBoss MID V2 (~$2 400)
|
| 1x FlexBoss 21 (~$2 400)
|
| 4x Eco-Worthy 48 V 100 Ah LiFePO4 batteries (~$1 500 ea)
|
| 18 U server rack (~$500) -- total hardware ~$14 760
|
| My big hang-up has been the rooftop work, permitting and
| inspections--almost no one I call will touch a true DIY system.
| If anyone here in the Bay Area has recommendations for installers
| or back-of-house permit-whisperers who'll partner on a non-
| Tesla/Sunrun job, I'd love to hear how you made it happen. Thanks
| again for the inspiring guide!
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Crazy, where I live the payback on the hardware would take
| ~114,000 kWh (or 13) years at 24kWh per day, $0.13/kWh).
|
| Where you live it's only 24,000 kWh to pay off the hardware, or
| just under 3 years ($0.61/kWh). I'd definitely pull the
| trigger.
| sowbug wrote:
| Greenlancer will draw up code-compliant plans that you can
| submit to your local building permit agency, and they'll revise
| if anything needs it. It cost less than $400 last year. You've
| done enough research that they'll be able to easily take your
| project and turn it into something legal.
|
| I recently did an Enphase system of a similar size to yours. It
| was fully DIY except for wiring the combiner and a roofing
| company to plug all the holes I drilled. Working with PG&E was
| truly an epic year-plus battle culminating in a CPUC complaint,
| but in the end it was really just a bunch of emails.
|
| I don't have any installer recommendations, but it should be
| easy enough to find a local electrician, and I've found that
| they tend to know others in adjacent fields.
| breakds wrote:
| Thanks so much for sharing your story - hearing about your
| DIY Enphase install (and epic PG&E battle!) really gives me
| confidence. And the information you shared is extremely
| helpful for first-time DIYers like me.
| bredren wrote:
| What happened with the broken panel shown at the end of the
| article?
| nodesocket wrote:
| We've recently had some crazy storms and power outages and my
| Ecoflow units kicked in and worked perfectly. I have a River 2
| which I use as a UPS for my Mac Mini + Monitor at my desk and a
| River 2 Pro as a UPS for all my Ubiquiti networking, Protect
| cameras, and severs in my racks. Then I have a Delta 2 I can
| hookup to the two Rivers to add additional charge. Just pulled
| the trigger on a 3600watt gas generator off Amazon as well incase
| of extended outages. While not whole home backup by any means
| it's a solid setup for electronics and server gear.
| GratiaTerra wrote:
| I installed a similar EG4 inverter and battery system and had a
| similar experience. The big problem I ran into was that EG4
| inverters are NOT compatible with my state's power grid (Hawaii)
| but because I had so much power, it turned out I never needed to
| connect to the power grid but I am loosing out on selling power.
| (Check with your local power company before buying!).
|
| Another problem I had was that a week after installing, one of
| the TIGO units burned up and started a fire that burned a hole in
| a solar panel. I only noticed the problem when I saw that one of
| the solar arrays wasn't putting out power. Replacing the
| defective unit solved the problem.
|
| Also, I had assumed I would need a generator to power through
| consecutive days of dark clouds but I instead opted for Ford's
| Pro Charger Station which has a feature that allows you to power
| the house; no need for a generator. However, its been over a year
| and not once have I needed this.
|
| My big takeaway is this: having energy abundance is the good life
| when you have all electric appliances. My EV (a Ford Lightning
| Truck), hot tub, AC, water heaters etc have been running over a
| year with no problems and zero costs after the initial
| investment.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| How many days can the truck power the house, and what's the
| longest stretch of overcast days you get (in Hawaii, I am
| gussing you get at least some sun almost every day).
| GratiaTerra wrote:
| Truck at 100% = 131 kwh, Minus 10% loss in transfer = 120 kwh
| House using 12 kwh/d = 10 days, up to 24kwh/d = 5 days
|
| Local conditions are typically partly cloudy/rain but still
| system producing more than can be used.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| It's kind of telling/ironic that the author gripes (whether
| rightfully or wrongly) about PG&E wanting more return on
| investment due to their risk of doing business in California, but
| when the author decides to build their own power system to not
| deal with PG&E, literally almost every paragraph related to their
| planning/setup contains a mention of some different
| California/city regulation that the author had to meet or else
| it's illegal for them to build their own power system. To the
| point where they had to pay a professional to help them meet all
| the regulations.
| vasusen wrote:
| This is the key issue. We are over-regulated.
|
| We rebuilt our house in the SF Bay Area in 2022 and went fully
| electric, no gas line anymore. It was really sad that I
| couldn't resuse any of my previous 12 kwh solar panels that
| were fully functioning and had another 10-15 years on them as
| they wouldn't match the new regulations.
|
| I tried to get them installed on a separate area in my own
| backyard for off-the-grid charger just for my car, but you are
| not allowed to have a big off-the-grid system unconnected to
| PG&E. No electrician was willing to help with risk of losing
| license. The author was lucky that his dad could help with
| electrical.
|
| Due to similar issues, I couldn't find anyone to take them for
| free as well. Demo dad was a truly sad day to watch these
| perfectly functioning solar panels being destroyed by a crane.
| bityard wrote:
| Wow, not being able to have an off-grid system AT ALL without
| the utility's approval just sounds bonkers to me. I guess
| PG&E is even more evil than I thought.
|
| Used solar panels are a pretty brisk business right now. Lots
| of places are replacing their 10-15 year-old panels with new
| ones just due to the better efficiency and capacity alone.
| And now that we have over a decade of large-scale solar
| experience to draw from, we are finding that they tend to
| degrade a lot slower than expected and that the original
| 30-year lifespan was highly conservative. I'm surprised you
| couldn't find someone from out of state to buy them.
| vondur wrote:
| I was reading something the other day about an interesting
| dichotomy in California. It's one of the most heavily regulated
| states, yet also one of the most lawless at the same time.
| gdubs wrote:
| This disabused me of the notion of doing it myself, lol. This is
| super impressive. Hope to one day be confident enough in
| electrical work. That and plumbing are the areas of home
| improvement that I still just would rather sub out.
|
| But, this is such a cool article. The quotes on solar installs
| for some reason seem a lot higher than what you'd expect, given
| all the charts showing the absolute cratering of solar energy
| prices - but doesn't seem to work out that way when it comes to
| residential installations.
| danans wrote:
| > This disabused me of the notion of doing it myself, lol.
|
| The author did a very custom setup. If you want to DIY with a
| pre-integrated setup, you can enroll in Enphase's self
| installer program, and complete their online coursework:
|
| https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/manager/registration?_gl...
|
| I think EcoFlow may have a similar option.
| gdubs wrote:
| Ooh, thanks for this. I've been considering some metalworking
| classes, something like this could also be really fun and
| enriching.
| danans wrote:
| I still recommend hiring a licensed electrician to do the
| actual physical installation, because it's easy to mess up.
| Havoc wrote:
| Suspect it would have been cheaper to invest money in upgrading
| the homelab and aircon to more efficient. Not downgrade, but
| rather moving to newer lith nodes etc. Tackling the usage before
| bigger battery system often makes sense
| somanyphotons wrote:
| The solar system will pay for itself within N years, and then
| he has free power for as long as the batteries and panels last
| Havoc wrote:
| >pay for itself within N years
|
| The total outlay in that calc is affected by how big of a
| system you need though.
|
| If you've got no obviously inefficient gear then yes you just
| put in a system of whatever size is needed.
|
| If you have easy wins on the consumption side then you do
| that first.
|
| Silly example but say you could eliminate half your
| consumption with a once off $100 spend then you do that. You
| don't pay through your nose for an system twice the size just
| because of ""free"" power later.
|
| Where that cutoff point lies will require calculation, but
| chances are old enterprise racks are on the wrong side of it.
| bsder wrote:
| It's really unlikely that most people will gain a lot of
| money from these kinds of installations nowadays (an EV
| probably tips that somewhat).
|
| The big benefit is the resilience. Since you are using them
| every day, they will be _far_ more likely to work in the
| event of an outage than a gasoline generator that you test
| once a year.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Pretty cool. I'd love to get into solar DIY but it seems pretty
| daunting. I moved in to a place recently with an (apparently very
| old) 7kW rooftop solar system without a battery, and I called the
| original installer to talk about what my options are if I wanted
| to expand it, either adding more watts or adding a battery. The
| overall take-away from talking to the installer was that it
| wasn't worth it because my existing system uses some different,
| older technology, and that making any substantial improvements to
| it would change my "NEM" whatever that means. The way I
| understand it, it would move me into some other, more expensive
| regulatory regime. I don't know--my head was spinning after the
| conversation, and I was basically convinced to just ignore the
| system I have and not touch it.
| danans wrote:
| > Missing site diagram placard at MSP
|
| I got dinged for this on the first inspection of my own self-
| installed solar+battery system.
|
| A lot of signage companies don't know how to do the placard, but
| the company that I found that knows how was PVLabels:
|
| https://www.pvlabels.com/04-645-map-placard/
| duffpkg wrote:
| Even with tariffs batteries are _very_ cheap. Into the 4 year
| mark my cost per kwh is down below $0.02 because I end up using
| excess power for all sorts of things because it is "free".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40877337
| ellisv wrote:
| I've interested in solar and batteries but unfortunately the
| return would be too long for us if we hired a contractor and I'm
| not confident in my own skills to pull it off correctly.
|
| Mostly I want an easy whole home battery just for some arbitrage.
| Our rate plan has a 4 hour peak period of $0.27/kwh vs $0.14/kwh
| off peak. Of course the peak time is when we actually want to use
| a lot of energy running our AC and other appliances.
|
| Unfortunately I haven't found any DIY stand alone battery systems
| that offer the simple scheduling I need since most seem to be
| only backup systems.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > $30K
|
| Wow. That's ten years of electrical bills where I live in Texas,
| and you also have to deal with the increased water leakage risks,
| any maintenance issues, storm problems, etc.
| hurtuvac78 wrote:
| The author says that the resale value to PGE is 25% of the buying
| price.
|
| Is there some way to get a better rate by selling CPU time
| instead, when the sun shines and batteries are full? Especially
| if you have your own server rack.
|
| I have computing needs that can wait for 12/18 hours. Would it
| make any sense to have those processed by distributed solar
| server farms between 11am and 5pm? They just take data in and
| send results back, using their own "free" marginal kwh.
|
| It would reduce the need the connect to the power grid, but still
| benefit from selling solar power indirectly.
|
| Cloud providers may just be so much better at doing this already?
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