Recent content by Doom Man

Related question: how long is "too long" for the wires from the panels to the Gateway? My Gateway, panels, and PW's are within a few feet of each other, but a foul-up on the installation made the panel-to-Gateway wiring run about 100 feet when it could have been less than half that. I wasn't...

It shouldn't be complicated. My soft-start was only complicated because of a Daikin heat pump with unusual wiring. Premier Components Supply sells the soft starts online for about $250, and their employee Jeffrey Solak was very helpful identifying which unit I would need. Sure-Start Products

I doubt you're losing much production. It's only a few of the panels, and only for a few months in winter. You can probably do the math pretty quickly. Maybe $40 per year, tops? So the question is less about maximizing production and more about cleanup of debris and maybe hurricane damage...

My A/C tech did not know a "soft start" was a thing. He kept saying hard start and I kept telling him no, soft start. He called a few supervisors, who didn't know the difference either, so the tech eventually called the company owner, who knew the difference and set him on the right path...

All good comments here. I'm also in a 1:1 net-meter area, and I usually keep my two PW's in backup-only mode. One reason for using self-powered mode, ID'd above, is that's it's fun to play with for a while -- at least for the kind of person who spends time on an online solar energy forum...

I think a variable-speed A/C is the way to go. (I believe "inverter-driven" is the same thing.) You want an A/C that never needs more amps than the PW's can provide. A variable-speed unit is more expensive, but they're much more efficient and are likely to be cheaper in the long run, assuming...

I was happy to see no news on the Powerwall, because I just bought two of them last year. I hope the million-mile battery arrives one day, but I don't want my new system to be obsolete already!

Do they make one that exhausts out of a gable wall in the attic? I've got a sealed, conditioned attic, so it doesn't help to exhaust living space air into the attic. I saw some of QC's units that exhaust through the roof, but they use a lot more power than the others -- no ECM motor -- and I'd...

That's a more correct way to say it than what I said above. It was mentioned in a few articles that more or less said "don't worry about a little clipping; it's good for you in the big picture." It's been over a year, so I can't recall the sources. Another factor was that the extra cost of a...

A lower-rated inverter will be more efficient than a higher-rated inverter. So you might get some clipping with the smaller inverter, but you can more than make up for that with increased efficiency in converting to A/C.

Yes, but I don't know if what I do is optimal. I'm in south Louisiana, where we have frequent summer outages. Lately I've kept the reserve at 70%, to be sure I've got power if a thunderstorm knocks the neighborhood out for 8-10 hours and I'm not able to change the thermostats to conserve...

Here are some answers from Tesla: Best Practices During Power Outages | Tesla Support

You can also lose internet for a few minutes if your modem or router restarts when the PW takes over. This can happen even if the change appears instantaneous. My home network restarted about half the time, so now I have a small UPS for my router and modem.

I didn't think so, but BrettS earlier in the thread mentioned a mini-compressor in there. I haven't heard anything like a compressor in mine this summer (south Louisiana - hot!), but maybe there could be a quieter thermoelectric cooling system?

I know there's a fan that cools the PW's, and I'm not surprised that there's a radiator and coolant. But without a condenser of some sort, a radiator and coolant would only get the battery down to ambient temperature, right? So if it's 90 degrees outside, the battery will be at 90 degrees...