Summary of A little about our Off Grid Solar set up
Summary of A little about our Off Grid Solar set up
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A little about our Off Grid Solar set up
Our personal Solar story : |
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Published by admin on 21-Jan-2017 16:00 (428 )
Our personal story : ( the short version lol )
We began our venture into off grid Solar over 7 years ago now. We,when we began,only ran a tiny 640W system !! that’s right ! , less than one kilowatt! and to quickly answer any obvious question regarding how was our life living with that tiny system? , well , we can tell you that it sucked big time !!. I must admit that at the time many years ago,we did already understand quite a bit about life with solar from research we had done for a few years prior, but nothing could match or prepare us for the actual harsh reality of moving away from the grid and trying to live with ONLY 640W’s …. !
The moment we moved in with our little Solar system, one line of words became very common on a daily basis and bloody annoying for particularly myself. The loud yell from the house to me from Kerri ( my partner) rang out all to often !
” Steve!! , the powers gone out again !! ” yikes!, did I get sick of hearing that! .. lolol Our 640W was good for next to none of the things that on grid, we were used to doing. On a daily basis, turning the TV or computer on was a risk! , even hitting the lights was a hit and miss situation most evenings.
Now, again I must admit that we had a rather old battery set, that should have been swapped out at the start and turned into 6 boat anchors ! :- ) but we tried to get by for as long as we could with them . ( btw that was a big mistake! ) that I will elaborate on later in this article.
Moving quickly forward over the past 7 years, we now live with a really comfortable total of 4 KW and 1000amp battery bank made up of 12 2volt batteries. Our system is made up of 3kw @ 240volt ( through the inverter ) and 1kw @12volt ( I will explain why we use both later ) These days we run very close to what would be considered to be a very normal home,using all the mod cons and even a big arse cooler in summer ! , so life for us now after 7 years of lets say interesting power availability or capacity, is dam good :- )
A brief run down on our totally off grid power setup
I am not going to go on about our first tiny solar system , but I will show and explain our latest effort in this area of power supply.
As I have mentioned , we now run a 3kw (which is by no means huge ) 240V system along side all of our 4 separate 12 volt lighting setups .
This may sound strange, but until you have gone without power and light for a while , I suppose “redundancy” is not an issue you would be aware of.
This pic below is of our 240V power control board.
It is a 24volt input from our panels It does look quite expensive, but for what it does , it was a great value spend .
This board is connected to our 1000 AH (amp hour ) battery bank, made up of 12 / 1000amp 2volt batteries, pictured below.
The pic below is of one of our little 12 volt lighting power controllers.
They are only 20amp and have only one 200W panel powering each of the 4 we have spread around the property. Each of these is connected to just one 200AH (amp hour ) battery . This type of tiny 12 volt setup runs all the LED lights that we have , which number in total around 35 .
We use these so that it will never be the case , that all our lighting goes down at once! One of these setups run the main house lights, another runs the little house we call it ” stand alone flat and one runs our large shed lighting and yet another actually powers the bridge lights....
(the bridge pictured in our header)
To be continued :- )
We began our venture into off grid Solar over 7 years ago now. We,when we began,only ran a tiny 640W system !! that’s right ! , less than one kilowatt! and to quickly answer any obvious question regarding how was our life living with that tiny system? , well , we can tell you that it sucked big time !!. I must admit that at the time many years ago,we did already understand quite a bit about life with solar from research we had done for a few years prior, but nothing could match or prepare us for the actual harsh reality of moving away from the grid and trying to live with ONLY 640W’s …. !
The moment we moved in with our little Solar system, one line of words became very common on a daily basis and bloody annoying for particularly myself. The loud yell from the house to me from Kerri ( my partner) rang out all to often !
” Steve!! , the powers gone out again !! ” yikes!, did I get sick of hearing that! .. lolol Our 640W was good for next to none of the things that on grid, we were used to doing. On a daily basis, turning the TV or computer on was a risk! , even hitting the lights was a hit and miss situation most evenings.
Now, again I must admit that we had a rather old battery set, that should have been swapped out at the start and turned into 6 boat anchors ! :- ) but we tried to get by for as long as we could with them . ( btw that was a big mistake! ) that I will elaborate on later in this article.
Moving quickly forward over the past 7 years, we now live with a really comfortable total of 4 KW and 1000amp battery bank made up of 12 2volt batteries. Our system is made up of 3kw @ 240volt ( through the inverter ) and 1kw @12volt ( I will explain why we use both later ) These days we run very close to what would be considered to be a very normal home,using all the mod cons and even a big arse cooler in summer ! , so life for us now after 7 years of lets say interesting power availability or capacity, is dam good :- )
A brief run down on our totally off grid power setup
I am not going to go on about our first tiny solar system , but I will show and explain our latest effort in this area of power supply.
As I have mentioned , we now run a 3kw (which is by no means huge ) 240V system along side all of our 4 separate 12 volt lighting setups .
This may sound strange, but until you have gone without power and light for a while , I suppose “redundancy” is not an issue you would be aware of.
This pic below is of our 240V power control board.
It is a 24volt input from our panels It does look quite expensive, but for what it does , it was a great value spend .
This board is connected to our 1000 AH (amp hour ) battery bank, made up of 12 / 1000amp 2volt batteries, pictured below.
The pic below is of one of our little 12 volt lighting power controllers.
They are only 20amp and have only one 200W panel powering each of the 4 we have spread around the property. Each of these is connected to just one 200AH (amp hour ) battery . This type of tiny 12 volt setup runs all the LED lights that we have , which number in total around 35 .
We use these so that it will never be the case , that all our lighting goes down at once! One of these setups run the main house lights, another runs the little house we call it ” stand alone flat and one runs our large shed lighting and yet another actually powers the bridge lights....
(the bridge pictured in our header)
To be continued :- )
