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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-07-20, 13:54

I'm going through my house now to figure out what I would actually require to be full off-grid. I've already replaced most of the lightbulbs with LED, even the CFLs. I've condensed servers into less physical machines to better conserve power. Already upgraded the appliances when I moved in. Basically I've cut costs as much as I can generally speaking without going so far in that we can't have lights on during the day, do laundry with a dryer vs clotheslines.

I'm fairly certain I'm going to require a big system given my family and our current power consumption. I'm working on getting the kids to just turn a light off when they walk out of the room, let alone not stand in a doorway, turn the light on to look for some thing (never entering the room) and then walking away with the light still on, and sunlight coming in the windows!

Thing I'm seeing is that PV panels are now up to 92% efficient and warrantied at that for 25 years. That is pretty substantial. Batteries are the part that would be most costly for off grid from what I can tell. It all depends on the kind you get and who branded them. Something like the PowerWall is cool, but "sealed" where rack mounted cells allow for individual replacements as needed. Most of those are rated and warrantied for 10 years from what I'm seeing.

The inverters, charge controllers and such are where I'm digging right now. So much to learn and yet I'm loving this idea of being my own power source. Then my power company can do just about anything they want and it doesn't matter to me.

I actually had someone tell me that we had to be concerned about actually cancelling power service to the house because it might get the house condemned. According to the source there is politics at play there, but that seems really odd to me.

When I last looked into this the tech was different and batteries have made the biggest change for the better. Panels are improving but not as fast as batteries.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
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