Designing an off grid solar solution always seems to end up being a feast or famine situation. You either have more potential than you can use or you fall short of having enough due to battery capacity, Season, weather or unexpected loading. There is no question that the AIO's have helped with this by being able to utilize the grid (or a generator) to make up for shortfalls but since excess can not be sent to the grid for later use, or a compensation payment amount, PV production has to sit idle. Those people that are grid tie never encounter this since they upload to the grid whatever their panels produce in excess of house loads.
You see many folks trying to find a use for extra PV capacity by either manual load addition or automatic dump loads. Other folks add more battery storage so that they can go longer between PV production intervals. Most of the solutions bring their own problems. One being if you get dependent on the "dump" load you added than the times of lower PV production puts you further in the hole. In the case of added battery storage you can reach the limit of not having enough PV to charge back up your battery in a reasonable time frame if it gets drawn down too much. More PV than puts you back into a possible under utilized potential.
My latest setup allows me to manually transfer a hot water heater on if I see my batteries charged by midday. Or I can switch a window AC to run.
Curious of how other off gridders handle the feast and famine times.
You see many folks trying to find a use for extra PV capacity by either manual load addition or automatic dump loads. Other folks add more battery storage so that they can go longer between PV production intervals. Most of the solutions bring their own problems. One being if you get dependent on the "dump" load you added than the times of lower PV production puts you further in the hole. In the case of added battery storage you can reach the limit of not having enough PV to charge back up your battery in a reasonable time frame if it gets drawn down too much. More PV than puts you back into a possible under utilized potential.
My latest setup allows me to manually transfer a hot water heater on if I see my batteries charged by midday. Or I can switch a window AC to run.
Curious of how other off gridders handle the feast and famine times.