Success!

Well the experiment can only be described as a success. At 9 pm last night I switched the house completely off-grid. We ran the house off the battery bank all night. Solar power began to come in almost before the sun was over the horizon somehow. Not much, just a couple of hundred watts, but even so, I was surprised. We made no effort to conserve electricity. We just did what we always did.

By 8 AM we were running the entire house off the solar panels and putting a few hundred watts back into the battery bank. By 8:30 we were making 2.5 KW of solar and dumping almost 2KW of that into the batteries. By 11:30 AM the batteries were fully charged and the house running on the panels. We made 12 KWh of solar power just from sunrise to noon today.

I’m very pleased with how well this all worked. This means I probably won’t need to put the ground mount panels back up against the back side of the garage. We should be able to handle everything with just the new panels on the garage roof. Putting the other panels back up would remain an option of we ever ran into a situation where we’d need more power for some reason. But as of right now, we don’t need them.

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Author: grouchyfarmer

Yes, I'm a former farmer. Sort of. I'm also an amateur radio operator, amateur astronomer, gardener, maker of furniture, photographer.

7 thoughts on “Success!”

    1. The only things we left grid connected only are the electric clothes dryer and the house’s central AC system.

      With the AC, the inverter could handle it easily but it’s a matter of battery capacity. This is a 100 year old house and rather large, about 2,400 sq ft. So it is a big house and not all that well insulated. If we let the AC run overnight it would deplete the battery bank to the point where it would be difficult for the system to recharge the batteries and run the house at the same time even in ideal weather conditions. We just don’t have enough solar panels for that. Our climate here is such that we generally don’t need to run it constantly even during the summer so it isn’t a huge cost. If it eventually gets replaced with something more efficient like a heat pump system, we decided to leave it grid connected.

      The electric clothes dryer draws about 5 KW when its running. Again, the system could handle it but we can actually get along just fine without it air drying the clothes outside so don’t use it very often anyway.

      Except for those 2 items the whole house, lights, computers, appliances, natural gas furnace, everything can be switched over to run from the solar system.

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