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Drago

Drago

Legendary Member
Location
Suburban Poshshire
Inspired by a thread elsewhere.

Donyou have domestic solar, wind, waterwheel etc for power or heat generation? Tell us about it, what are your plans, how is it working out?

I'll kick off. I've a 16 panel 5kW solar installation. Solax inverter, Owl Intuition monitoring system. On a directly South facing roof, so it works very well. In due course I wouldn't mind adding a battery system to it.

As a project I'm considering building a windmill generator to charge a small bank of batteries to power my ham radio gear. Nothing firm planned yet, but I'll do it one DAT.
 
Bollo

Bollo

Failed Tech Bro
Location
Winch
Drago said:
Inspired by a thread elsewhere.

Donyou have domestic solar, wind, waterwheel etc for power or heat generation? Tell us about it, what are your plans, how is it working out?

I'll kick off. I've a 16 panel 5kW solar installation. Solax inverter, Owl Intuition monitoring system. On a directly South facing roof, so it works very well. In due course I wouldn't mind adding a battery system to it.

As a project I'm considering building a windmill generator to charge a small bank of batteries to power my ham radio gear. Nothing firm planned yet, but I'll do it one DAT.
Click to expand...
Is this heading into Prepper territory? :tongue:

Nothing on the house, but I've got a garage in a block with no power that I've converted into a pain cave. All top Victron schmutter - 100W panel, MPPT charge controller with bluetooth for monitoring, 350W inverter and a 115Ah battery. 12V Led lighting. This is enough to power a Kickr, telly, monitor with intel's failed PC-on-a-Stick for training software, radio and Di2 charging through the winter.
 
S

SteveF

Guest
Drago said:
Inspired by a thread elsewhere.

Donyou have domestic solar, wind, waterwheel etc for power or heat generation? Tell us about it, what are your plans, how is it working out?

I'll kick off. I've a 16 panel 5kW solar installation. Solax inverter, Owl Intuition monitoring system. On a directly South facing roof, so it works very well. In due course I wouldn't mind adding a battery system to it.

As a project I'm considering building a windmill generator to charge a small bank of batteries to power my ham radio gear. Nothing firm planned yet, but I'll do it one DAT.
Click to expand...

I like this thread and will be keeping a keen eye on it...
 
D

Deleted member 26715

Guest
Is there a decent way of doing solar, we've had a couple of the multinationals around, but all they are interested in is selling you their finance to purchase. They were costing out at £8K, around £11K after the interest & at least 25 years before you could re-coup the investment.
 
welsh dragon

welsh dragon

Thanks but no thanks. I think I'll pass.
I don't have solar power, but i would like to especially due to the rising cost of electricity. I have 5 1000 litre tanks that also collect rainwater from my roof. Not using it as my main water supply, but as i live in an isolated area, and there is a distance of around a quarter of a mile from the mains accross common land and then onto my land, if ever there was a problem with say a burst water mains pipe, i wont be able to afford the cost of repair. I have a filtration system already set up and it would only take about an hour to have the water coming into the house from the tanks. The filtration system would mean that we could drink the water. As we have a septic tank, we would then be completely self sufficient as far as water is concerned.
 
Globalti

Globalti

Legendary Member
I bought a 20 tube solar water array and mounted it on my roof. The heat transfer liquid is water with 25% car antifreeze. The liquid is pumped around by a miraculous little 12v DC pump powered by a cellphone charger. The liquid passes through the manifold where it picks up heat from copper bulbs at the ends of the vacuum tubes, that fit into blind sockets in the manifold with a heat-transfer paste. The heated water passes through 10 mm pipework into the coil in a 160 litre copper cylinder I bought off Ebay. The weight of the cylinder is taken by the stud walls around the airing cupboard below. Inside the airing cupboard below is the main house cylinder, also 160 litre and with two coils, one heated by the gas boiler. In this way the solar panel pre-heats the cold water flowing from the attic storage tank with a target of 60c, which it can reach in June or July. The hot water then passes into the bottom of the main house cylinder where the boiler finishes the job. The system is quite well balanced, the debit from the coil matching the output from the 20 vacuum tubes pretty well. At the top of the closed heat transfer circuit is a small plastic header tank with a clear plastic sight glass I made, but in 7 years of use the level hasn't dropped at all. Everything is controlled by the solar controller, which measures the temperature difference between the bottom of the attic tank and the manifold and activates the pump when the difference reaches 8c. If the attic tank hits 60c there is a dump valve activated by the controller, which is supposed to divert excess hot liquid down to the second coil in the house cylinder although this seldom happens. The whole system cost me £700 to install, so £100 a year. I guess it might just have saved us that in gas costs by now so may soon start paying for itself. It has only broken down once, when the first pump seized after five years causing a fuse to blow in the controller.

I got all the equipment from the very helpful Peter, here: http://www.solarproject.co.uk/

A few pictures:
 

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Dirk

Dirk

If 6 Was 9
Location
Watchet
I've got a windmill and I eat a lot of beans.
 
OP
OP
Drago

Drago

Legendary Member
Location
Suburban Poshshire
Phaeton said:
Is there a decent way of doing solar, we've had a couple of the multinationals around, but all they are interested in is selling you their finance to purchase. They were costing out at £8K, around £11K after the interest & at least 25 years before you could re-coup the investment.
Click to expand...

Mine was £7k. The system works very efficiently because I'm exactly south facing. Had I got a low interest loan from, say, Tesco, the FIT payments alone would cover the repayments, and then you can cream off as much leccy as you like for your own use.

The way FIT payments work is very basic. You get paid for half of what you generate, the assumption being that half will get exported. In reality to can spank the arriss off it duringthe day and use it all yourself, but you'll still get paid for half of what you generate.

I've not looked at the figures since the FIT was lowered for new claimants last year, but for me on the older scheme between the FIT payments, and the electricity I use myself for free, I'm roughly cost neutral with my electricity consumption. That means it would have paid for itself in 5-6 years, and everything beyond that is gravy. The system is guaranteed to still be 95% efficient in 25 years (and the firm I used has been trading over 40 years now, so there's a realistic chance they'll still be trading to honour it) so I've got potentially three or more decades of good times.
 
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