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.

Author: grouchyfarmer

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