Someone asked what it’s like actually living with this system. And since it’s been more than two months since it’s been running this is a good time to update what’s been going on.
As for what it’s like living with a system like this, it’s just like being on the grid. If you were in our house you wouldn’t be able to tell if we were running on grid power or on power provided by the EG4s and solar/battery power. Everything just works. We do avoid using 240V equipment like the clothes dryer and central air when we’re running off the EG4s because they are such huge energy hogs. But for everything else? We just use everything else as we normally would.
We’ve had no problems at all with any of the components of the system with the exception of the solar panels. More about that in a moment. The inverter/chargers and batteries have worked exactly up to their specifications. The only annoyance is that the fans on the EG4s can get pretty loud when we have a lot of solar power coming in from the panels. But since they’re down in the basement and not in our living space we don’t notice it.
The only real drawback to the system is that we don’t have enough solar power coming in to adequately keep the system fed, so to speak. We can’t, for example, run the house off batteries at night and then make enough solar during the day to both run the house and recharge the batteries by a significant percentage. If we’d draw down the batteries to, oh, about 70% or less, we wouldn’t be able to fully recharge them and run the house at the same time.
But that’s something we knew when we started this. We knew we weren’t going to have enough space to put in as many solar panels as we really needed without resorting to using the garage roof, and we can’t do that at this time because the roofs are scheduled to be replaced in the next year or two. So we decided to make do with as much solar as we could put in now and then put in the roof top solar after the work was done.
But the solar panel situation has changed this week so let’s take a look at that.
Those are the HQST 100W panels that originally fed the Bluetti and those, along with several 220W panels from Newpowa have been feeding the EG4s. And unfortunately I’ve been having some problems with them. Considering how cheap they are, about $75 each, they’ve been doing pretty good. In good weather conditions they’ll produce about 650W. Now I know that 650 out of 800 doesn’t sound very good but when you consider the conditions here in Wisconsin plus all of the smoke we’ve been getting from the Canadian forest fires, that’s actually pretty good.
Unfortunately that abruptly dropped to 450W or even less so something obviously is wrong. I checked all the wiring, connectors, etc and couldn’t find anything so one of the panels must have a problem. And now I have 10 of the Newpowa 220W panels up against the back of the garage for the time being. I’ll need to put in some kind of semi-permanent mounting system for them before winter comes but for the time being just leaning them up against the garage is working fine. I’m pleased with them so far. At midday under good conditions they put out a full 2 KW. Yesterday we had pretty dense cloud cover and just for the heck of it I hooked them into the system and even with the clouds they were putting out 345W.
First chance I get I’ll have to test all of the HQST panels individually to see what’s going on with them. The ones that test good are going to a business outside of Milwaukee that’s going to use them to run security lights.
And I promised you a frog so here he is:
grouchyfarmer 
Nice update. I really wish I could make the move right now. But we have a car to replace. It’s always something.
Glad you provided that frog, there could have been trouble. I might have had to send bass fishermen your way 😉
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I know what you mean about there always being something. Same thing here. Home solar power systems are great but that upfront cost is the killer. If they could get the batteries down in price it would help a lot.
We generally have quite a few frogs and toads living in the backyard, and generally a few grass snakes too. But it’s been so dry this summer that I think a lot of them have had trouble surviving because he’s only the second or third one I’ve seen out there.
I haven’t seen any honey bees at all this year either and that makes me very concerned. Bumble bees yes, but not the little guys who do a lot of the pollenation. That’s probably why our wax beans haven’t been doing good this year.
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Guaging by my yard/woodline we are pretty short on snakes. Used to see King snakes often, haven’t seen one in ages. Rat snakes are still pretty common. Garter snakes, Ring-necks, and worm snakes used to be common, but on the downslide as far as seeing them on the property.
We have a glorified mudhole, AKA a pond, in the backyard, frogs are plentiful. As well as enough tree frogs to drown out your thoughts on a summer night.
Funny you brought up bees. I have seen a huge decline in bees too. I look for them every year and try to guage how they are faring. The honeybees were down in numbers, but they were pretty steady on my clover in the grass for the last few months. Now the clover is slow and the bees are few. Bumbles were pretty even with the honeybees overall, but both definately down in numbers.
I’m so keyed in on bees I even slow way down when cutting the grass. I’ll even swing the mower side to side to help shoo them away before I run them over. I’ve been thinking about making a gadget that rides on the front of the mower to “tickle” the grass just before I get there with the mower deck. Something like the old metal leaf rake, but wide enough to cover the deck width, and at the right elevation to shoo them bees before I compost them…
My wife thinks me crazy lol. But I’ve been known to fabricate all kinds of things that work. Not only do they work, they are built to last.
Oddly enough, just got back from town, I stopped in at our local hick radio station to get my honey. I won a lb. of local honey on a rock music quiz a couple weeks ago!
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We get some really beautiful grass snakes round here, but that’s about it. I found a really big one sunning itself on the rocks in the back yard a couple of of years ago, must have been at least 3 – 4 feet long. My wife came across one trying to get through the anti-rabbit fence that same year, about a 3 footer. Poor guy was in a panic trying to get away from us but couldn’t figure out how to get through the fence so my wife just picked him up and put him in a different garden and the poor guy just sort of laid there for a while looking stunned like ‘wait, did she really just do that’? before slithering off. I was amazed. I like snakes but only from a distance. I couldn’t believe she just picked it up.
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That’s awesome. We are very snake friendly here. Rat snakes, king snakes, garter snakes, and the hog nose, all calm down after a few minutes of being caught. Yeah, you are going to get bit first, might draw a little blood even, but after they realize they aren’t your breakfast they calm down to the point of being downright docile.
I raised the kids to not fear snakes, how to catch them, how to handle them. Sometimes we’d keep a snake in an old aquarium for a week or two, then release it back into the wild. Wound up having baby garter snakes once doing that.
I always told the boys to release the snakes in my shop. Maybe they’d get a mouse before they’d get back to their normal routines.
Your wife did good 😉
Black racers never calm down. Those bastards are plain mean. Ask me how I know. 😉
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We have a couple of lavender bushes along the front walkway and the bees love them! Other than those visitors, however, their overall presence has been sparse. 🙁
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I don’t know what happened. Last year from early spring to mid fall we had honey bees everywhere. This year I haven’t seen a single one. Just the bumble bees. Weird
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It’s fairly well known, bees are on a sharp decline. Thus my concerns with them.
I have a lilac bush out front the bees n butterflies enjoy. But the clover out in the yard is a huge pollen gathering location. I’m so silly I’ll wait till many of the clover heads are starting to wilt before I’ll cut the grass. Just to let them have as much access to them as possible.
The clover grows back several times through the summer. It’s faded away now though.
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I enjoy following your solar system updates as an amateur radio operator is your installation reasonable fri quite?would you recommend the same installation now that’s up and running?
I know a amateur (ve7gde)that finding equipment that will play nicely with HF operation can be a challenge.from noisy solar charge controllers the outback fm80 is terrible for generating RFI and so is the Victron battery chargers and it has CE approval !
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Some of this solar equipment is indeed a serious problem for HF radio. The biggest culprit seems to be the MPPT charge controllers. When my Bluetti is charging it almost wipes out 40 meters. 30M isn’t too bad, 20M is bad. 17, 12 and 10M are pretty good. The EG4 6500EX units are much better. There is some RFI on 40M, but 30 and above isn’t bad at all. When I switch from the OCFD antenna to the magloop I talked about a few months ago there’s almost no noise at all, so the antenna you use can make a big difference.
Sidenote – I still can’t believe how quiet that magloop is on receive. I keep thinking my coax broke because on the OCFD my noise level is about S7 to S9+, and when I switch to the magloop it drops to almost nothing.
I should do an update about that PreciseRF HG3 QRO. That’s turned out to be an amazing little antenna.
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