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Hello everyone, Western Pennsylvanian here, I just stumbled upon this site and it seems there are a lot of solar enthusiasts out there! Thanks for letting me join, I'm sure I still have a lot to learn and I look forward to every minute of it. :) As the title suggests, I have a 7 cubic foot...

Back when I first designed the system it had a couple problem days in late summer where it cut out. That was a deep cycle lead acid 100ah though and I had the cutout set pretty high. I also had a pwm charge controller and the roof was pitched west, not south! Any one of those improvements would...

Build a greenhouse around your hot tub and you get double the bang for your water heating buck!

October 2022 This Chinese FEENCE branded battery is available on Amazon for $279 with free shipping. For comparison Weize is currently $300, AmpereTime is $350. In the weeks since my purchase there is a new slightly cheaper battery by “IOD” that is selling for $259 but someone else is going to...

If your concerns are accurate, then post the detail of what you believe to be in error, along with a link/timestamp and what you propose is the correct info. If you're correct and there is an error, then this thread can be where that's solved. If you're in error someone will come along to...

That guy lost his **** during covid and bit the hand that had been feeding him. Specifically, he made his money selling people on his concept of urban farming, even calling himself The Urban Farmer. Then covid hit and he put out some videos calling Urban people worthless pieces of **** and...

I think we're all missing a big opportunity here. Someone with a chatGPT account should ask it what the deal is with the word "woke" and then paste its answer here. That would be pretty interesting on several levels ?

There are a lot of tradeoffs in designing I/O on circuit boards. The most accurate ones my company has made were 24 bit a/d converters with 1% resistors and even with them we had to calibrate each board on a bed of nails before assembling them. In our case the I/O was flexible so we had 2...

I have a similarly sized system on a greenhouse. The excess "dump loads" are put into heat when it's cold and ventilation when its hot or humid. If you like growing things, toss up a hoop house near the trailer and have at it :)

A century ago people filled their ice houses in the winter and year round they used that ice to feed their kitchen ice boxes. Call me lazy but I find electric refrigeration to be so much simpler.

Have you considered a sterling engine geared up to spin an alternator?

California is going to do what California is going to do. Not all of their ideas catch on in the other states

Efficiency? I prefer a single battery bank to maintain. But I'm all about a charge controller per string and I'm all about an inverter per load. Toggling inverters on as needed leaves you with no losses when the load is off, that's true efficiency. I'm just wrapping up this project:

I'm almost done with the third generation power sled for the fridge and I thought it worth an update. I've added a better controller/brain and that has allowed me to make the whole operation much smoother. There are now 4 modes based on battery level- Full Power, Basic Power, Reduced Power...

Off grid systems can be pretty safe in this respect, even ones built by folks you might not want to trust. But if you're grid tied there are a myriad of possible issues you can't easily sidestep. The smart power meter is a glaring example.

Still going strong. The battery heating experiments have been coming along nicely. I've found that with the foam insulation I maintain about 2° rise above ambient for every watt of power I apply to the heater. I have a 6w heater so in theory I don't have to tell the CC to turn off unless...

I'm not here to give advice. That said, is there a per-panel micro-inverter offering that shuts down when grid power is out? That would solve two issues, for one you could buy one per panel at your leisure as you add to the system. You'd likely be sizing the panels for the micro inverter...

In 2s 2p you'll need a charge controller that can accept 150v on cold days. For current you'll need to account for 28A on the combined wires. 14A is the max current on the non-combined strings. I'd put a 30a breaker on the series and use 4awg if you went that setup.

This thread is almost exactly what I've been working on! It seems I wandered upon it a little late as I've already cast the first stone, so to speak but it's only the first test cast and I intend to do more anyway. (That said, In my scenario I'm trying to heat concrete with an embedded...

At one point someone offered a crt-based TV with a VCR and a DVD player inside of it. For reasons unknown, they sold a lot of units and other manufacturers followed suit. In the decades since I've struggled to understand the thinking of the buyers. It seemed obvious that once any of the...

To offer a simpler explanation- You need to match the impedance of the source and the load to maximize power. We older folks are well versed in this stuff because back when we all had hi-fi stereos this came up a lot. With sound systems you need to match the impedance (resistance) of your...

It's not a temperature thing, that's what current rating protects against. This is more of a high pot thing where the insulation could cease to be effective in preventing it from shorting against any metal surfaces it's laying up against.

That is exactly right. :)

In solar-land the "best in class" fridge is a chest freezer run at 38°

To be clear- you'll now be in charge of the temp in the freezer. Before you take over that control (before wiring the relay in the back of the stat to the inverter switch) I would suggest that you power up the thermostat and watch what it does for a few days. If you drape the temp sensor in...

McKravitts- I designed the very circuit you're describing. I am using a Tracer 2210AM charge controller which comes with a high temp cutoff but no low temp cutoff. The native thermistor for my device is a 47k ntc and I've bought a $5 thermal switch to pull an 8k resistor into the circuit...

I assumed Giant Spaghetti Monster

You can get a 0° switch but these are generally fairly cheap devices so you'd have to test every one. If it triggers at 31.5°F it's probably still in spec for the part but it would be useless for our purposes ;)

I fixed that drawing for you (attached below). Why it showed lightbulbs generating energy is beyond me!

If you want the most redundant, hard to kill, no single point of failure setup then you should consider multiple charge controllers (one per string) and multiple inverters, (one per circuit). I'd still stay with 48v though. Five 2000w 48v inverts would cost you around a grand and any one...