This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Just got 750Wh out of testing a 400W solar array, in January, with a peak insolation of 250W/m^2 (near the Canadian border).
The technology has gotten so good and cheap that if you have any kind of battery backup you'd be insane not to include panels to top them up.
750Wh is enough to run 46W of stuff for 16hrs a day, so internet plus a laptop, lights, and phones. That's with 40lb of panels ($170) and a $100 battery.
In the summer thats going to be high enough to run some refrigeration too.
Keeping light loads on battery helps use your generator efficiently too, because running them constantly for light loads is wasteful on petrol/gas and their limited running life. There's no need to run a generator just for house lighting any more.
Best part is that if you use the energy all the time, your "UPS" will pay for itself, by my count in about 3 years thanks to some pretty good sale prices (and utility power costs skyrocketing 8%/yr due to typical mismanagement)
I'm seriously thinking of scaling up to an ~8kW array to zero out my summer power use and keep all critical loads going in the winter.
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