Solar Experiment

I’m running an experiment at the moment. I wanted to do a full test of the solar system now that we have the new panels out there so while keeping my fingers crossed, I switched the whole house over to the battery bank at 9 PM last night. I want to see how well the system performs under more or less real world conditions with the whole house running off the grid. The battery bank was charged up to 100% and everything worked fine, so around 11 PM I went to bed

And I was up at 3AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Sigh… Unfortunately that’s not unusual for me.

Anyway. it’s about 5 AM now and I just checked the system and the battery bank is at around 83% capacity and everything is just working.

It still kind of amazes me that we’re entirely off-grid and everything just works the way it normally does.

One of the things I’m trying to see is if we have enough solar panels up now to not only run the house but also recharge the batteries after they’ve been used all night. Unfortunately it seems the weather may not cooperate. Yesterday they were claiming it was going to be sunny all day today, but that forecast has changed and we’re supposed to have clouds moving in by mid-day.

One curious thing I discovered is that these new panels provide a surprising amount of power even in cloudy weather. Yesterday we had almost solid overcast skies but they were still putting out enough power to run the entire house as long as we were reasonably cautious about energy usage. Up there is a screen shot from the system showing how much power we were getting even under some pretty good cloud cover.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. I want to keep testing the system to see just how much power we can get out of it now that we have a decent amount of PV out there and how to fine tune, so to speak, our energy usage patterns, etc. to reduce the amount of grid power we use as much as possible. I can run numbers on the calculator or spreadsheets all day long but nothing beats having actual real world data to go on.

Okay… now this is interesting. It is now 5:22 AM. The sun isn’t even up over the horizon yet and I’m already getting power out of the panels? Here’s what the data looks like right now

This is a bit hard to believe. How can I be getting 97W of PV coming in when the sun isn’t even above the horizon yet??? Granted that’s not even enough to run the lights in the kitchen, but come on, seriously? How am I pulling any power at all out of those panels right now?

One thing this has already shown me is that the gas furnace fan pulls a lot less power than I thought it did. According to the specifications it should pull about 700W but it looks like it’s closer to about 400 or so, which is a good thing.

Anyway at the moment everything seems to be working exactly the way it should. I’ll keep you posted.