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Mostly off-grid shed with AC safety net

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  • organic farmer
    replied
    Where I live, the grid goes down at least once a month. Some months we lose power 3 or 4 times, for 2 or 3 days long each time. But most times the power is down for only 4 to 8 hours. Been here 9 years so far, so far no month has gone by without power lose.

    We are going with Solar Power, as a method of hopefully getting access to reliable power. Meaning power every day, all month long, every month.

    I want my 'off-grid' or grid-assist system to fully use solar power as much as possible, and at night to take a small charge from the grid [when the utility company manages to keep the grid up].

    I hope that our battery-bank will be able to avoid cycling, and therefore to last longer.


    In our town, most homesteads do not have access to the grid. We have one paved road going through town, power lines run alongside the road, but only for a part of the road, not all of it. 'Rural Electrification' in the 1970s did wonders for the Tennessee Valley, but they never got around to doing rural Maine.

    The majority of towns in Maine, do not have grid power. When I was shopping for a home here, for most of the homes I looked at, the nearest power was 10+ miles away.

    Leave a comment:


  • Sunking
    replied
    One of the most silly things I have heard here. Last thing you would ever do let a Pb battery sit at 80% or every use battery power if you have commercial AC power available.

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  • sdold
    replied
    Originally posted by Bucho View Post
    Is there a reason you don't want to use the power grid as your battery bank? I mean it's hard to beat a battery bank that's perfectly efficient and lasts forever.
    And costs 1/10th the money for power and is more environmentally-friendly

    Leave a comment:


  • Bucho
    replied
    Is there a reason you don't want to use the power grid as your battery bank? I mean it's hard to beat a battery bank that's perfectly efficient and lasts forever.

    Leave a comment:


  • inetdog
    replied
    What I do not understand is why you have the batteries in the first place? Is the grid power so unreliable that you need the battery and inverter for regular use?

    If you are normally operating all of the powered equipment in the shed off the inverter you are paying far more per kWh for your energy than if you just ran everything off the gird and configured your battery and inverter as a standby UPS instead.

    More details please.....

    Leave a comment:


  • Amy@altE
    replied
    Not sure what your budget is, but the Schneider SW inverter gives you a lot of programmable capability, including setting priority of PV over grid for charging the battery. Then you don't need a standalone AC charger. The Conext SW 2524 is under $1300.

    Leave a comment:


  • Oranjoose
    started a topic Mostly off-grid shed with AC safety net

    Mostly off-grid shed with AC safety net

    I couldn't decide whether to put this in the on grid or off grid sub forum, so let me know if this isn't in the right place. Figured the off-gridders have had to get a bit more resourceful .

    To get to the crux of the question, I would like to have a system where there's a battery charger on AC hooked up to the batteries 24/7, but only keep the batteries at 80%. The solar panels would be responsible for pushing the charge above 80%. Therefore, the AC wouldn't kick in until the batteries dipped down to 80%.

    The smart chargers available seem to be configured to keep the batteries topped off to the brim continuously (rather than the desired 80%). Does anyone know of an existing solution/equipment or clever DIY that I can deploy to achieve this? While there is intended to be a computer running 24/7 in this shed, I would like to avoid using computer controlled relays soldered onto existing meters/chargers to program this behavior.

    A tiny more background is that I have the luxury of running AC to the shed 24/7, but I want to have solar contribute to the energy source. The shed is not supposed to use much power, but even so, I've calculated that going securely off the grid will be pricey. But going mostly off the grid, where AC can kick in on those stretches of cloudy days etc is significantly cheaper.

    So my thought for doing this would be to have the solar panels connected to the battery bank with the charge controller as usual, and to simultaneously have the bank connected to the AC battery charger set to keep the batteries no lower than 80%. The computer electronics/lights would also be continuously drawing from the bank through an inverter.

    Any ideas?

    Thank you.
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