Plan: Off grid solar with a Model S battery pack at the heart

[adiggs]

Wood pellets are becoming hugely popular here in northern New England. Pelletizing the wood makes handling easier, and they burn more evenly and efficiently, lowering air emissions. You can buy either pellet stoves for a room or whole-house boiler systems. So, no need for fossil fuels for heating.

I've seen a few design prototypes for small run-of-river turbines, but durability is an issue for anything that goes in natural bodies of water. It's not just water in that stream! You are also potentially looking at messy regulatory approvals.

I've thought about the wood pellets too. They're popular here in the Pacific Northwest also - lots of wood industry here, so lots of scrap wood to be pelletized. And a good intermediate stop climbing the rungs of the energy independence ladder would be wood pellets made somewhere else.

To hit the mark for a mostly enclosed and sustainable energy system, I would want the ability to make pellets on-site (with wood from on-site of course). And with a big solar array and the right electrical shredders / dryers / formers, I figure there would be a big summer time energy surplus that could be poured into making pellets, thereby providing a mechanism to shift summer time electricity surpluses to winter.

Also to make the pellets work really well for winter time use, I'd want a setup where burning the pellets generates heat for the house, and also heat for a steam turbine for generating electricity during those dark winter days when the solar panels aren't chipping in. Heck - while I was at it, it'd be nice if the pellet stove also had a flat top I could use to cook on

 

[Ampster]

Most net metering states are set up with virtual net metering. This means that all utility bills within a certain distance can become dependents on a host utility bill.

This is so that people with more than one meter can aggregate their bills to have one solar energy system offset everything. The stipulation is that all the bills have to be in the same name. ......

I actually have an application in to Southern California Edison for virtual net metering on some property I own. It has been almost two months and they are making excuses that these kind of applications take longer than the usual Net Metering arrangement. I already have a PTO (permission to operate) for one meter in my group of contigious buildings.

 

[wk057]

Welp, got my combiners wired up on the combined->charge controller side of things. Just need some PV wiring to hook into them...

I'll probably tie in the charge controller side tomorrow.

(I didn't put the metal cover back on yet)

 

[wk057]

Finally got around to starting to configure all 17 charge controllers. I have one thing to say:

For a charge controller with full internet connectivity via wired ethernet along with a proprietary network among themselves via RJ11 cables.... it sure seems odd that I have to manually set the time physically on each individual one.... among other things.

 

[mitch672]

yeah, they are apparently not "internet savvy", with NTP, just tell them your timezone and DST yes/no, done.
perhaps you can suggest it to them. Normally, don't the combiners go on/very close to the panels/roof, to keep the wiring costs/runs low? Can't tell where yours are, maybe that is in your attic...

 

[wk057]

Normally, don't the combiners go on/very close to the panels/roof, to keep the wiring costs/runs low? Can't tell where yours are, maybe that is in your attic...

Yes. Those three are in the attic. The attic has a finished loft area, and these are on the unfinished side of the wall. Should be a reasonable run from the roof panels to the combiners there.

 

[wk057]

Had a little extra time while I wait on my roof mount panel installer, so I whipped up some code to poll data from my charge controllers and put it into a database.

I tidied up the polling code and released it under GPLv3 on github here: wizkid057/midnitelogger · GitHub

There seem to be a few other open source releases for getting data to/from the Midnite Classic charge controllers... but nothing that did what I wanted. So, wrote that from scratch.

The result is that I can gather a good amount of data for displaying nicely later. I setup a local web page on my LAN that compiles the last 24 hours of data:

(the graphs are showing yesterday's data in that screenshot since today was rainy)

First graph is power output in watts throughout the day, second is PV voltage and PV VoC voltage, and the third are the charge controller's two internal temperature probes. The sawtooth pattern on temperature graph is showing the cooling fan kicking on and off while the temp was near the fan cut on/off temp range.

Pretty cool. Will be even better when I get more online.

 

[bwa]

I absolutely love watching the progress of wk057's installation.

 

[jvonbokel]

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but I'm sure I'm not the only one dying to know your thoughts on the Tesla Energy announcement last night. Obviously it would take a lot of Powerwalls to equal your system's capacity, but from a cost standpoint, or an ease of implementation standpoint, do you think they've hit the mark? If it had been available 6-12mo ago, would you have considered it?

 

[wk057]

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but I'm sure I'm not the only one dying to know your thoughts on the Tesla Energy announcement last night. Obviously it would take a lot of Powerwalls to equal your system's capacity, but from a cost standpoint, or an ease of implementation standpoint, do you think they've hit the mark? If it had been available 6-12mo ago, would you have considered it?

I'm planning to actually make a thread on this. I'll link it here soon.

 

[wk057]

Here it is: Elon, I love you... but the PowerWall isn't that great...... yet.

 

[MarcG]

Dude I just noticed your solar array size... huge!!! And those 435W panels, would they be the 128-cell SunPower E20-series by any chance? ;-)

 

[wk057]

Dude I just noticed your solar array size... huge!!! And those 435W panels, would they be the 128-cell SunPower E20-series by any chance? ;-)

Yep!

(Photo of testing six of them from earlier in the thread)

 

[MarcG]

Very cool! I got a few of them as part of an employee giveaway (I work at SunPower), but thought they were too large so traded them in for 16 smaller ones - 8 of which fit in the D:

 

[wk057]

Very cool! I got a few of them as part of an employee giveaway (I work at SunPower), but thought they were too large so traded them in for 16 smaller ones - 8 of which fit in the D:

Nice!

Looks similar to when I packed some of these larger panels in the P85

Had two of those loaded up. I think this hit on an extreme for the cargo space of the Model S. lol.

Anyway, today is the day! Supposed to be getting started on my roof mount portion of panels this afternoon.

 

[MarcG]

Anyway, today is the day! Supposed to be getting started on my roof mount portion of panels this afternoon.

Very cool! Please keep us posted on progress.

What mounting system are you going to be using? I got one of UniRac's solution (SolarMount-E).

And sorry if this was already discussed, but which inverters are you going with?

 

[miimura]

And sorry if this was already discussed, but which inverters are you going with?

I know this thread is 60 pages but if you were paying attention you would know that the solar connects to charge controllers, not inverters. That is a central part of the architecture of this system.

 

[wk057]

 

[wk057]

So, day 1 of roof mounting work complete. Basically on the steeper portion of the roof (post above) there will be 6 panels. Today all of the mounting rails and wiring for those six panels were installed. Tomorrow, hopefully, we'll be able to get those six up there and done and move on to preparing the main roof (30 more panels).

Unfortunately, conflicting schedules due to the ~2-week delay in getting this started means that next week won't be able to be a solar install work week. After tomorrow work will pause until the 18th. So, hoping to get at least those 6 panels online tomorrow so I have something to play with next week. lol

I hopped on the lift and took a few pictures of the progress.

Installer had the nice idea to use these SolaDeck junction boxes that can be hidden under the panels. So literally nothing will be visible except panels. One box per six panels. There is finished space under the roof except for the very top portion, so the junction boxes need to be under the top row to make the wiring accessible in the attic space.

More tomorrow!

 

[wk057]

OK, I lied... more today. lol.

Here is a time lapse of today's work.... from way too far away, but, still cool.

Solar Install - Roof - Day 1 (2015-05-07) - Time Lapse 300x - YouTube