The graph is from the electric company website showing my usage for a single day last week. It was sunny all last week, so pretty much every day’s usage looks like that graph. The little peaks around 1pm are when I made lunch since I can’t run the electric range from the power station. I could have run things for about 3-4 more hours from the power station, but I like to end the day with it charged to at least 90% in case I need to use it for a power outage.
This is just my trial PV setup with 800W of PV on the south-facing side of the house and another 800W on the west-facing side so I get a pretty continuous 600W throughout the day. I’m currently using an Anker Power Station which is limited to 60V and 600 watts of input, so I’m not getting the most out of my PV panels.
Today I ordered two, big 16 KWh batteries and a 10KW inverter to finally start my “big boy” PV installation (for comparison, that’s 32x the capacity of this power station and 5x the total wattage in addition to supporting 220v split-phase). That will let me take better advantage of the panels since I can put all 8 in series for less losses (partial shading notwithstanding).
I’ve been planning on building this out all winter and am finally seeing it through. Totally unrelated (/s), but my electric rate just got hiked another $0.01/KWh so I wanted to get this in place before A/C season kicks in.
Nice! I’ve got 19.2kW of panels on my roof with optimizers and two inverters for 17kW A/C. I got them a couple of years ago and love em. They’re south facing and do a pretty good job (far north US). I installed a circuit breaker monitor so I can see how much electricity I’m producing and consuming per circuit. My power utility doesn’t show me nice fairly realtime graphs like yours.
I’ve been wanting to get batteries or a bidirectional EV that can power the home, but I haven’t been able to swing that yet. I’m still tied to the grid. But I’m working toward being grid fault tolerant. I’m jealous of your progress.
Back atcha. 19.2 KW would be amazing and probably way more than I need, but I don’t have near enough south-facing roof (sadly, I have plenty of north-facing roof. With these 200W panels I have, my back of the napkin measurements seem to make my limit about 6 KW on the roof. I may check the measurements of the 320W ones and see what that gives me, but I’m thinking it’ll be close enough that it’s not worth the extra cost.
I do have plenty of back yard, though, so after I get this up and running, I may do another string or two as a ground mount setup.
Grid-tie was my original plan, but power company has too many hoops, restrictions, and red-tape to make it worthwhile. Plus, I still need a backup power solution (e.g. a Generac) so I went ahead and got some big batteries right at the start since I was already planning on spending about that same amount for the generator + installation.
Yea, I went big so I could charge an EV or two in the future. I wish I had the yard to put them in instead of roof. I get a lot of snow here and I’d love to be able to easily clean them off. They’re basically useless for half of the year. Even worse when the snow melts it slides down, catches on the gutter and breaks the gutters. It pops the mounts out and I have to pop them back in every spring.
Would you mind sharing order details on the big batteries/inverter you ordered?
Literally these.
Once I get the wiring done and everything settled in, I may pick up another set and have a total of four 16KWh batteries and two inverters for a total of 20KW (the inverters can parallel up to 6 units, and the batteries up to 15).