this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Offgrid living

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I bought the electrical equipment from AltEStore and the panels (not shown!) from a local solar store. 4kW Schneider split-phase inverter (replaced once under warranty), and 60A MPPT. The array is a bit over 2kW. The battery bank is KiloVault lithium wired for 48V; 9.6kWh capacity (about $4800 for all eight units).

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[–] CadeJohnson 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

why it is sideways, I have no idea.

[–] splendid 1 points 1 year ago

Fun tech fact: instead of rotating the pixels when taking a portrait photo a lot of cameras will just add an EXIF tag that says how the photo should rotate. My guess is either:

  • Lemmy, the software running slrpnk.net, doesn't know how to deal with this.
  • Your camera didn't properly add the data
[–] perestroika 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for sharing. :)

Myself, I use 3 separate PCM-60X charging controllers (house facade, panel block A in the garden, panel block B), a stack of Nissan Leaf batteries (controllers have been adjusted to match voltage), redundant autonomous balancers (if one drops, battery balancing is not lost), a battery alarm for model planes (if something gets funny, it beeps like a smoke alarm) and a no-name (DC-AC isn't much of a name) 5 kW square wave inverter from Taiwan.

What I really miss is not having a battery bunker. They're indoors among things that could burn, so they must be carefully watched. If opportunity arises, I want to move them into a safer location.

The house computer is a Raspberry Pi, but so far it's only involved with wasting energy. If it sees that batteries are full, in cold season it starts gradually ramping up heaters in a thermal storage tank, until it detects that voltage has responded and dropped. Then it keeps things that way, reducing load if voltage sinks and increasing load if voltage rises.