Lol, no. And if you were expecting something clever like a goat, sorry to disappoint lol. Just a basic battery-electric push mower that I’ve charged from solar panels all season.

Check back in 2-3 years when I (hope to) get an EV. I’m sure I’ll be crowing about it then 😆

In the mean time, would you like to hear about my solar powered lawn mower?

The usable south-facing roof area is full, unfortunately. I’ll have to do ground mount in the back yard and run a bunch of conduit if I want to add any more PV.

The 32 kWh of batteries are made of two 16 kWh batteries in parallel. Since this system is in lieu of a backup generator, I have it configured to only draw the batteries down to 50%. That leaves the bottom 16 kWH available for emergency use. Basically, for day to day usage, I treat the battery as being half the capacity it really is.

I’ve only been running this system for about 3 weeks now, but the batteries have been operating between 65% and 90% pretty consistently even running the A/C pretty heavily. They’ve been closer to low 60s this past week, but the wildfire smoke was choking out the sunlight Thursday and Friday.

about $0.06 USD/kWh

😭 The per-kilowatt hour rider fees on top of my base rate per kWh are way more than that lol.

Lol, def can become an obsession. First hand experience there.

I’ve wanted a whole house PV system for a long time, and this is just me finally getting around to making it happen. SO and I were talking about getting a backup generator installed, but that would have been about $7,000 for something that would only get used two or three times a year since our power doesn’t go out often (we have no heat or ability to cook when the power goes out, and it’s always in the dead of winter when we lose power). The PV system I sketched out was about $9.000, but in addition to covering us during outages, we could use it daily to reduce electric bill so, unlike the generator, this would pay for itself over time.

SO finally came around to my way of thinking, so here we are lol. My limiting factor is usable roof area. Of the roof that’s south facing, only about 14x20 feet of it is suitable for mounting panels. There’s a west-facing gable, but it’s blocked most of the time by a tree. The east-facing side of the gable is available, but it’s pretty much always foggy in the mornings here, so it wouldn’t add much to the system.

Unless I build a ground mount setup in the back yard, we’re pretty much at the limit of how many panels I can buy. I’m kind of glad for that because otherwise I’d just keep buying them.

Check out [email protected]

For heating, I’ve been wanting to try a solar collector. Not sure if you’ve come across Greenhill Forge on YouTube or anywhere that covers his projects, but he does all sorts of off-grid stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cPuVZjnbi4

That’s where he builds and tests several different styles of solar collectors for solar heating. The collectors are pretty inexpensive to build so that may be an option if you just want to (help) keep a shed warm.

All of the labor has been DIY, and I’ve got about $9,000 invested in the system components.

Back of the napkin math, at current electric rates, puts my ROI at just under 9 years. If electric rates keep going up, it’ll pay back even faster.

Edit: Depending on how you look at it, ROI could be in as few as 1.5 to 2 years. This system is in lieu of a whole house generator that would have cost us about $7,000. Had we gone with that instead, it would never have paid for itself (other than peace of mind) and we would have been perfectly content. So if I’m only considering the price difference between this and the generator, it’d only have to pay back $2,000.

I’m more of a hands-on learner but that can get expensive depending on the hobby haha. For going solar, I’m still very much in progress but definitely on the path to where i want to be.

Basically the first step is to decide what your goal is. Do you want to go totally off grid? Just reduce your electric bill? Have backup power? All/some of the above?

If you only want to reduce your bill, check into what’s called grid-tied or “balcony solar”. That’s the easiest to get started with, but it requires cooperation from the electric company since you’re feeding back into the grid. I can’t do that here, so I went with a standalone/battery-based system.

Once you identify your goal(s), you’ll need to figure out what your “base” load is, and then how much your peak loads are so you know what size system to shoot for. Then you’ll need to choose an inverter that can meet those with some extra capacity for unforeseen spikes. I started with a 10KW system, but it’s also expandable up to 60 KW( 6 units in parallel). My house only has 100A service, so two inverters would actually give me more power than I can currently get from the power company lol.

For the panels, you can really only expect to get 60-80% of their rated output most of the time. The rated output is under perfect alignment with the sun, at the perfect angle, and with absolutely no obstructions. In practice, you’ll never see that. As an example, I usually only get between 3 and 3.4 KW out of my 4 KW system on the best of days. This is normal.

For batteries, they’re technically optional depending on your goals. If you just want to shave some money off your electric bill, you can forego the batteries and the inverters will happily mix PV and utility to power your loads during the day. e.g. If you’re drawing 1,000 watts and only getting 900 watts from PV, then it’ll make up the missing 100 watts from utility power.

I sized my batteries based on my average daily usage plus an extra 10 KWh. We use about 20 KWh per day, so I got two 16 KWh batteries for a total of 32 KWh. That means, if there’s no (usable) sunshine at all and we lose power, I can run the whole house for a little over a full day. Any sun hitting the panels will reduce the current draw from the batteries while also charging them if we use less than the PV is producing.

The longest power outage we had was about 29 hours, but if we typically experienced multi-day outages, I might have gone for a larger battery.

I had a much longer reply written up, but it barely scratched the surface. So hope this helps in a general sense but happy to answer any specific questions if I can.

Be careful. Those things are addicting.

That’s how I started: a little 5v, 6 watt panel I stuck in the window to charge my phone while I worked. Then I wanted to charge some other stuff, so I got a 15W panel. 15w panel was nice, but 100 watts was much better, so I bought two 100W fold-up panels like you’ve got.

Then I bought a big 1 KWh power station that could supply up to 2000 watts. I take it camping and charge it from the two 100W fold up panels.

But, sadly, the demon had its claws in me and refused to let go. “Why should I only use that solar power two or three times a year?” the voice said. So I bought 4x 200 watt panels so I could use the power station to power my homelab and refrigerator during the day.

Still, that wasn’t enough to satiate my addition. Now I’ve got 4 KW on the roof, 32 KWh of house battery, and a 10 KW inverter that is currently powering our house.

Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.

It’s delicious.

I like to mix whipped cream vodka with strawberry-watermelon flavored Mio, and it’s distinctively red. I’m gonna start calling it “Health Potion”.

Ask your doctor if it’s right for you.

Ugh, I wish I could add “reasons” for my user blocks as well as have the dates I blocked them available. Would make this easier. But yeah, Striker is in there.

I’m inclined to believe it’s part of the “group”. Every post I can see of it’s is a question which is the same thing seen with the others in the list here; none of them have a single post that uses a declarative statement as the post title. That’s more than a little sus given the context here.

Regardless, I tend to block accounts that I feel camp out and/or abuse the “ask” communities.

Ah, the War5oldier account is banned on its home instance and I guess they just didn’t re-use the name with another alt.

The only one of those that wasn’t in my blocks was raptor, but I guess I didn’t notice them as much. Comparing raptor to one of the others in that list, yeah, the posting is pretty similar.

Yep, I recall blocking at least Dan for the same reason as the other two. Not sure about the other one but can’t recall seeing posts from them anytime recently so probably did.

Are two of them “commander graves” and “war soldier”?

Because I noticed similar and blocked them ages ago

lol. My guess would be either really, really long and covers every possible scenario or extremely short and brutally honest.

Oh, yeah. SSH from laptop or Termux on my phone.

Not sure if there’s a CLI way to deal with captive portals or not. Maybe a text-based browser like Lynx/Links2 if the portal isn’t super fancy, but I’ve used the MAC cloning method for ages and it’s just my “go to” for dealing with that. Honestly, I don’t deal with them very often since I just use a hotspot much of the time with it.

I’ve only had to go through a captive portal once with it but MAC cloning was sufficient

Photovoltaic / Solar power installation.

“Solar system” just sounds weird when I say it.