Greetings from very sunny Nicaragua

[NicaSol]

Hi all. Greetings from very sunny Nicaragua. My wife and I are Canadians who have retired here. We ran a B&B for a number of years. Our entry into a RE system about 16ish years ago came from very unstable grid power - 3-4 day outages, daily cuts, voltage fluctuations from 90 to 140 volts, and high KWH costs. Hard to run a business with the potential for a soggy sleep, warm beer and wilted salad. We are now fully retired and over the years Nicaragua has had massive developments in wind farms and geothermal power and a target to be 50% RE by 2025. Even though the residential solar market is starting to bloom access to expertise and products is very limited. Interests include the fiber arts (weaving), photography, travel, philanthropy (local community), and sustainable resources (particularly water collection and use).

[Ampster]

Welcome. Care to share your system details, and what you have learned in 16 years?
Note, I see you have done that in a separate thread.

[NicaSol]

24V, 3.2 Kw panels, 2xTS-MPPT-45, 1xPS-MPPT-25, 800Ah Ritar lead carbon AGMs, Xantrex SW Plus 2425 (old faithful), Trace TM500.

>Despite living in a favorably windy area ( a few kilometers from wind farms mentioned above), stick with solar; IMHO/experience residential scale turbines are noisy, prone to mechanical failure, and inefficient unless it's blowing stink.
>The internet (with due diligence) is a great resource. Sure there are knowledgeable and competent sales and tech folk in the industry. I've also had my share of mis-guided/mis-informed advice (and caught it).
>Make due with what you have. In a perfect world there can be perfect solutions. In the real world there are real solutions (often compromised). Nicaragua has very limited sources of RE expertise and even more limited access to products and resources (without enormous expense). For example, due to political strife and economic embargoes the only batteries available when mine had to be replaced were the AGMs mentioned above. I know FLAs and have used Trojans successfully for 16 years but they (any FLA) were no longer an option.