solar battery advice needed.

In the UK your electricity supplier should be crediting you for the power you feed into the grid, reducing your bill, I think the rate is set nationally. This is on top of the government green incentive subsidy which pays you for the installed capacity weather its generating or not. This should allow you to use the grid as a "battery" without needing to mess around with batteries and chargers. Check with your supplier, the electrician who installed the system should have carried out the required registrations or provided you with certification.

cheers
Giles

craneplaneguy said:

Batteries blow, at least giant lead acid home style banks, they wear out, take up room, can be dangerous, and are not all that efficient as per putting a watt out and getting it back. Sealed types are much better but twice the price. I am lucky to have my utility as my battery, stored off site, no maintenance, and of infinite size and it operates at 100% efficiency! All for a basic hookup fee of $5.00 a month!

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Yep. I wish I could convey that to all the people I speak to on line who say "I want to cut the cord, go off grid and give the finger to the greedy utilities!"

oh the irony....i have a load of spare 12v lead acids left from my ebike....which im using in what ive come up with instead of the initial idea.

tbh Pb batteries last quite a while if you make sure they dont go dry or over sulphate.....i always find it weird that batteries used to be a maintainable automotive item but now they're suddenly disposable add proper distilled water when dry and use a good desulfating charger/device every now n then and they should be fine.

ive half given up on the battery grid tie inverter.....its non nessesative to my current setup/arrangement after actually increasing my power usage via profitable bitcoin mining.

using some junk i had about ive done something similar.

ive invested in extra smaller panels (6x20w flexibles) and cheapy boost converter (mpt7210a) its charges a 24v (2x12v 22ah) battery bank using one of those lead acid balancers. this battery bank powers a 1000w computer uninteruptable power supply/inverter.. on a full charge itll run an (all in one) pc i have for over 4 hours.,probably longer but i havnt left it on.

im still testing at the moment but its has the scope to last even longer when i add a the extra batteries.

so far its been £30 for the mpt boost charger, £14 for the lead balancer, £40 for the pc UPS off a mate, and 120 quid for the panels. the batteries were mostly from a charity shop from years ago but i think it worked out at like £20 for 8 of them. so £224 so far.

at 15p a kwh cost.....it would need to run 1493kw through it to break even.... thats 1kw for 62days worth of hours at the inverters maximum output.

honestly for the power output/input it kinda doesn't seem worth it. The current ROI seems more like 3-5 years....but i suppose i have nearly all the building blocks i need to progress. i can always change/add more panels, batteries....or even get a grid tie inverter in the future.

A few years ago I had one customer (in my very part time little solar biz) who ended up buying a 8KW grid tie setup from me. He never once asked about ROI, he was in his late 70's, maybe early 80's, that cracked me up!

On the other hand, a late 20's friend I helped out recently to install a grid setup on his shop, will benefit from the setup for decades. Point being, it drives me crazy when people, ESPECIALLY people who have the spare cash laying around, DON'T install solar. It's a sure fired "investment", a no brainer, and I like to point out to people that unless they believe the utility rates will go down in the future, and their homes will also require less electricity (instead of more), why go solar?! When I get a cold call from some yahoo, expecting me to try and convince him that "solar pays", expecting me to provide some kind of slick sales pitch, I pretty much hang up on them, there are plenty of other solar providers that can do that, I deal with the already convinced people, that has made my part time hobby biz a lot more fun and also profitable. My one thing I like to say, and it's true, is that I have not paid a utility bill in going on 40 years, except for nowdays the 5 bucks a month standard fee, and my utility could triple that or more and I still would consider it a bargain in lieu of having to have batteries again. One funny thing: it took me a few months of riding once I discovered ebikes, before I realized the sun, wind, or the force of falling water, was pushing my ass down the trail, I am so used to it I take my power source for granted I guess. My hydro electric system is powered by the same snow I snowboarded on this winter, melted and now falling down the mountain past my place, I find that frigging amazing, fun stuff.