Random Renewables Thread

I must have. Problem is the bills are soaring faster than I put up panels and what I have is only generating about 1/3 of usage even in de summer. If I plastered everything I would have to get in 3 phase or racks full of batteries and I'd have well over 20KW and no idea what to do with it all. There is only 1 nice stretch of south facing roof though and maybe I can put 4-6KW up on that. The rest is mostly east west and some of it badly shaded so much lower yield stuff

If your main vehicle was an EV, you could dump an enormous amount of electricity into it. My own car is charging at 6kW at the moment, purely from excess PV production (while our awful hungry condensing dryer is running too)

Yep, I would be in. Need to see some figures of course.

A very quick sanity check sum to see what sort of investment we are talking about. Their new project of 8 wind turbines in Scotland has 5600 private owners and 19 businesses (lets say each business invests as much 20 private owners) and it raised GBP30 million. That's £5k each.

That's off-grid. Do you really want the hassle / huge cost per kWh in a house that has a grid connection where simply buying from the grid will be cheaper than maintaining that system, even if it gives "free" electricity from wind?

Why is it off grid?

It would feed into a charge controller and 48v battery anyway. Then feed that into the inverter. If it goes from a 48v battery to a grid tied 48v inverter?

(Also, my ultimate aim is to be completely off grid)

Polish sounding guy? Yeah I've seen that one too.

I'm rural so it's not an issue unless the cows complain. The thought would be to supplement solar with other generation that could come in times of low solar

Not quite the way it works but you could have a wind charge controller charging your batteries and then a hybrid grid tied inverter also charging the batteries from PV and discharging them based on your house load.

Beware of wind though and listen to the thousands of people who have tried it (like me). Or just be as stubborn as all of us were, do it anyway and find out for yourself it doesn't work (or to be more precise: the returns are appalling for the money invested) 😂

That's it. I'm not interested necessarily in making each and every part of the system I end up with pay for itself, moreso that we are off grid and no longer have a meter connected. That's the ultimate goal. I dont care if I end up spending 50k+ on that goal. I'm currently nearly at 30k (including some parcels on their way to me ) and no where near capable of off grid. So far on a good day we're covering 100% of use but on a bad day and/or a day we need a full charge in the car, we're struggling to even get to night rate on the batteries.

This to me points a need for a) more more batteries, and b)other options. I have a generator 7kVa but that would be last resort

I wonder if you had the hill but no river, could you get two precast tanks and make a closed loop pumped hydro system. Could use it as a big old battery and couple it to a ground mounted array

Could use rainwater to fill it and it would also provide an irrigation backup in dry summer months

Of course you need land for all of this to work, not really a runner for those of us in housing estates

Fair phux ELM327 hope u manage to get off the grid. I'd say its definitely doable with the stuff that's available now

That's the punter. Ta for digging it out. Great video to watch

2 EVs, a large house and presumably you are going to heat with electricity too? I guess you will have to come up with a system that produces 50-60kWh per day in winter when there are plenty of days you will get almost nothing from PV. Hope your land is on a steep hill, then you can do hydro. Otherwise that fossil fuel generator you are talking about is going to be very busy (polluting the air around you) as a wind generator won't cut it for your budget unless you build it from scratch yourself maybe. I very much doubt you will go this route as it is a major step up from just clicking a few solar PV panels into each other or connecting a few bus bars to battery cells. But if you do, have a look at Hugh Piggott's stuff.

I'm glad you're taking the sensible approach and not just pumping €50k in a wind generator with the lofty aim to go off grid whatever the cost!