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! Good to see more people trying to run on there own power more.
Do you have/did you check into a hybrid invertor, or do you manual swap the power around?
The small setup I have now is based on this so I currently have to manually move where things are plugged in, but the 10 KW inverter I just bought is a hybrid one.
It’ll charge, invert, and load balance automatically and there’s configuration you can program to set the cutover levels, charge/discharge limits, whether it should prioritize power the loads or charging the battery, and such. It can also mix utility and inverter power and switch between the two pretty seamlessly (10ms switchover which is comparable to a UPS).*
*According to the data sheets, anyway. I ordered it today and wont’ have it until probably close to end of the month.
Ahh, a power station. I have on of those too for camping and using it at home to let the 3D printer run off-grid on some spare camping solar panels.
For the house I’ve used a hybrid invertor. It can do all of the same functions but can do much more power, and it can also zero the meter (no import and export, since it automatically tries to compensate for your usage, whole house-wide)
Are there any platforms you use to try and outmate things yet? Or integrate it to track power usage?
Not yet since I don’t have it yet (should be here toward end of the month), but there are mobile and desktop apps which can interface with it over wifi and serial, respectively.
I’ll definitely be looking to see if there’s a HomeAssistant module or something or if someone has documented the serial protocol so I can write my own software.
Basically I want to be able to change the configuration without having to enter the numeric commands and params on the unit itself. I’m imagining something like a list of preset custom modes I can switch by having a program change the params to a set of predefined values.
Like, I want it to only charge the batteries from the PV most of the time (which is something you can configure), but I’d also want an easy way to tell it to charge from utility in case a big storm is coming or something. Once I have that, I’d like to extend it so that I can watch for severe weather events and if NWS issues a severe storm warning, have it automatically switch to that mode and back once the storm warning has passed.
That’s all down the road, though but definitely something I’ve been thinking about.
Home Assistant is super nice. Worse case if you can’t figure it out to control the power station. You can always use some power plugs to enable/disable grid charging with a switch.