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 