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| Thread ID: 147855 | 2019-05-13 10:41:00 | Anyone looked at solar power reciently | Laggard (17509) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1460695 | 2019-05-14 10:24:00 | electric cars will not change the price of electricity, petrol is not going away. there is a some basic fundamental reasons for that. keep in mind NZ tends to have lower sun hours than aussies, we are not called the land of the long white cloud for nothing. so our solar outputs per cost are lower. i did know someone who built off the grid because it would have cost $100k's to get power there as there was no power down the road at all. he had a dedicated room for batteries and a whole lot of them. one thing he had done was wire parts of the house for low voltage. eg lights run direct off the batteries which is a lot more efficient. one other big factor is its probably more worthwhile improving the houses efficiency. less power you consume the less require to be generated. nz houses are pretty crap for air tightness and insulation, and heating is a big energy user. also water heating and cooking are areas that can be improved. |
tweak'e (69) | ||
| 1460696 | 2019-05-14 21:38:00 | Paul and piroska, Fairgo almost always covers the bottom end of the market, meaning a small system to support power usage during the day(no storage) I'm looking at a bigger system to cover 80 to 90 percent of our usage using power storage. ) I didn't mention fair Go. Don't watch it anymore. I said the calculator showed it not economical and the solar companies got it removed. There you go. |
piroska (17583) | ||
| 1460697 | 2019-05-15 08:41:00 | Biggest thing is to go for efficiency in appliances and not bothering to use solar sourced power to heat things, bottle gas is cheaper. [ If you require power more than a few metres from your road power line, be prepared to gasp mightily over the price per hundred metres for just single phase power reticulation. ] The cheapest solar power components are usually the most uneconomical - it takes a lot of expensive panels and batteries to compensate for low efficiency charge controllers, low efficiency inverters are awkward to use as doorstops and only marginally better as boot scrapers, totally uneconomical as power converters even if you factor in the heat and noise as useful. There's not enough usable watts coming out and far too many watts going in. It's usually about "near enough" to have enough battery capacity to keep you going for 3 days with no solar. 2 days capacity is ok if you have a standby generator to fill in part of the time. High-end video cards and computer gaming power-house PCs are very expensive things to keep fed with lotsa watts. If you can find a trucking firm that replaces their truck batteries before they start to age, the storage capacity can be pretty cheap, sure lead acid is bulky, heavy and sadly low in efficiency, and old batteries may be lucky to last two years. Sure they're not deep cycle, but in practical terms, there's certainly not the ten to one difference between the price of a new deep cycle battery and a used truck battery. You might be lucky to get a practical 30% of the rated amp-hour storage from those cheapos, but try running your $$$ deep cycle battery past 50% of it's capacity for more than moments a month and see your battery life vanish smartly. Also, if you want to use short periods of very high current delivery, your old truck batteries will probably outperform the new deep cycle mega $ batteries two or three times over. The cheapos will get just as unhappy as the pricey deep cycle types if the battery shed is too cold - so insulate the battery shed better than you insulate your house if you expect a frost or two. One advantage of solar power in rural areas - your power supply is more reliable than the mains supply in serious storms unless you really goofed in your installation. |
R2x1 (4628) | ||
| 1460698 | 2019-05-16 22:39:00 | Thought I might throw this into the mix aardvark.co.nz | Laggard (17509) | ||
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