Continuation of the home solar project.
Around Midnight, Saturday June 17th, a very strong storm passed over my house, and hit my town and surrounding areas with a 115mph wind gust.
Power was out for around two and a half days, in which case, I powered my house fully off-grid.
While- this doesn't sound like a huge deal- do note, I was able to maintain climate control in my home, along with my ENTIRE rack of servers.
Starting your A/C compressor generates a massive inrush current. Many inverters will have issues getting the motor spinning.
In the case of my 3.5 Ton unit, the L.R.A. (Locked rotor amps) is 112.0 amps @ 220v (24,640 watts). This is far more current then my inverter can provide. This is the amount of amperage which it can potentially take to start the compressor motor.
This post, describes how to install a soft start, which will allow your compressor to easily start off-grid using your solar array with inverter and batteries, or via a smaller generator.
Continuation of the home solar project.
Part 4 of the home solar project. Adding monitoring tools and hardware.
Will be adding Iotawatt for per-circuit energy monitoring, and solar-assistant for monitoring the performance of my inverter / batteries.
Per my home solar project, I needed a method to collect data from both my batteries and inverters, in near-real-time, with no dependancy on the internet.
Since, my inverter's connection relies on cloud applications to move data around, I decided to give Solar Assistant a try after reading of its support for the solark-12k.
Finished Energy Dashboard:
Installation of my home solar project.
As apart of the Home Solar Project, I purchased and assembled an EG4 battery rack.
This post outlines the process of assembly, issues I encountered, and my final opinions.
For the second part of my Home Solar Project, I researched possible solutions and ordered batteries.
This post, describes some of the decision making process I went through.
One of my projects I have been working on over the last two years, is adding solar panels to my house to offset some/most of my electrical usage.
Here are the goals I wish to accomplish, and how I plan on accomplishing them: