Jon Coffey wants to install a battery system so he can store the solar power output when he's not at home — but he says he's "looking at nearly $20,000" to fund it.
I was quoted around $15,500-$16,000 for a 12.8 to 13.5 kWh battery plus install for comparison.
My understanding is the grid will only pull from solar if required. Is that so? That’s how my solar setup works on my caravan, so not sure if it’s the same.
I work from home. So my solar (house and caravan) are all utilised heavily during the day.
I’m sure many do now also. That, and timing hot water heating, diahwasher, washing machine. Etc. All should help
@makingStuffForFun@PetulantBandicoot “the grid will only pull from solar if required” You export what you aren’t using or storing at the moment of generation. The only question is how much that earns you - or costs you. The electricity has to go somewhere and it’s not like you can just let it run out on the ground :)
You see, that’s the opposite of my caravan’s solar. It can sit up there in the full sun and potentially generate a lot of power, but it won’t send a single thing to the caravan or the batteries unless they request it. So the batteries and the usage of the caravan pull power from the panels, but the panels do not push power, so to speak.
So that makes me wonder if the solar panels on the roof are the same. The reason I say that is that the electricity companies want to charge us for solar generation because they say that we are feeding so much power into their grid that it’s stressing the grid out. But if it’s the same as my caravan solar then it is not. And I guess that’s why I was hoping that somebody who knows about these kind of things could put some input in.
that’s a good question. I think it’s due to the scale. Household also always runs through an inverter to supply mains to a house, and interacts with the mains board whereas a caravan usually runs the standard regulator (which manages load requests)
The grid is effectively an (nearly) unlimited sink. So nearly all your power you generate gets pushed into it.
The catch is that as we all collectively push more and more power in, it increases the frequency (50hz -> 50.1hz), and most inverters have a cuttoff if the frequency gets too high. But as far as I know, that almost never happens, but if it did, that could cause a large set of power generation to drop offline simultaneously, which would then cause a frequency drop and a subsequent brownout.
My understanding is the grid will only pull from solar if required. Is that so? That’s how my solar setup works on my caravan, so not sure if it’s the same.
I work from home. So my solar (house and caravan) are all utilised heavily during the day.
I’m sure many do now also. That, and timing hot water heating, diahwasher, washing machine. Etc. All should help
@makingStuffForFun @PetulantBandicoot “the grid will only pull from solar if required” You export what you aren’t using or storing at the moment of generation. The only question is how much that earns you - or costs you. The electricity has to go somewhere and it’s not like you can just let it run out on the ground :)
You see, that’s the opposite of my caravan’s solar. It can sit up there in the full sun and potentially generate a lot of power, but it won’t send a single thing to the caravan or the batteries unless they request it. So the batteries and the usage of the caravan pull power from the panels, but the panels do not push power, so to speak.
So that makes me wonder if the solar panels on the roof are the same. The reason I say that is that the electricity companies want to charge us for solar generation because they say that we are feeding so much power into their grid that it’s stressing the grid out. But if it’s the same as my caravan solar then it is not. And I guess that’s why I was hoping that somebody who knows about these kind of things could put some input in.
that’s a good question. I think it’s due to the scale. Household also always runs through an inverter to supply mains to a house, and interacts with the mains board whereas a caravan usually runs the standard regulator (which manages load requests)
I wonder if it could be as simple as that, as just having the houses only supply, as the grid needs it, with something as simple as a regulator?
The grid is effectively an (nearly) unlimited sink. So nearly all your power you generate gets pushed into it.
The catch is that as we all collectively push more and more power in, it increases the frequency (50hz -> 50.1hz), and most inverters have a cuttoff if the frequency gets too high. But as far as I know, that almost never happens, but if it did, that could cause a large set of power generation to drop offline simultaneously, which would then cause a frequency drop and a subsequent brownout.