Sideways, sideways....
Well... After the btcmillionaire more than successful subject about creating a self sustainable pond in his property... I would like to ask.... Anyone here has fully self-sustainable solar powered property? I have studied a lot about it, but some real life experience from another fellow WO'er would be great.
I think it is already at the point where it is cost efficient (more so considering where I live... SUN all the time!) and I am perfectly capable of doing everything myself and know my shit about buying stuff for way less that its usual price (either second hand or surplus) which will also help reduce the total cost substantially.
The property already has its own waterwell with enough capacity to fill the 125000 litres pool over a couple days. So it is only the power grid what I would like to cut off for a completely self sustainable property. My dream!
Will WO also deliver this time? lol
I am certainly not an expert, but are you building new, or retrofitting an existing AC wired home/building? With solar I think you have two main choices to wind up with usable electricity: Use an inverter to convert it to AC to run your existing appliances (expensive), or build new, with larger wiring in the walls for DC (to avoid voltage drop), then find all DC appliances (expensive). Many do that with camping and RV appliances.
That is on top of the power generation itself. Then if you want to watch TV at night (or whatever) you need batteries/storage (expensive).
I don't know what your weather is, but you can get better BTUs per dollar of heating perhaps with a passive heat storage, and pump heated water around. Perhaps gravel beds under the house, and/or water for thermal storage. If you need air conditioning, you need a serious inverter (expensive) or RV AC unit. I haven't looked, there are surely green-type DC appliances now that are better than using camping/RV appliances. It would look funny for your luxurious BTC millionaire home to have tiny RV fridges around...
If you are building new, it's much easier to implement some of this stuff, compared to retrofitting. I am not an expert.
A 125000 liter pool doesn't sound very large (is this a swimming pool?), where I am from ponds are small (measured in tens of thousands of gallons), and lakes are measured in acres. Depending on your weather, perhaps some sort of geothermal involvement could help, and that takes a lot of power for all the pumping.
The house is already AC powered from the power grid.
Yes, I know the elements needed in the installation. In fact there are more than a simple inverter which might be the case for that example of a RV.
The AC wiring I am already renovating to current standards (better cables, more section, etc...) so I could do a parallel DC grid but that is not what I really want.
Heating is not really a problem where I live, (cool) air conditioning is. Also the pool pump and waterwell pump are quite powerfull. I would need to sustain around 5KW peaks in total for the entire house power needs.
I know that is probably too much for solar but I have a 150 square meters sun oriented surface above the house where I could install the panels. So there's more than enough space.
Then I see 300Watts panels are 1x2 meters square. I know panels don't usually deliver its max power but I am not sure what to expect IRL delivered power.... ie: 80% 50%?
I will probably just install a couple and see how it goes before adding more if the result is satisfactory but I supposed there would be some fellow WO member that had already did it (because of self sustain and all that).
Yeah, it is a swimming pool. Here it is considered a big pool I mean for a private/non-shared one. In fact I would prefer if it were a bit smaller or less deep but I can live with it thanks to the waterwell almost free water... otherwise I would be ruined by the water bill soon lol
Geothermal doesn't make sense around here. I mean, heating is not problem, it is electricity what I need to power the cooling air conditioners.
Poll
