thebaldgeek

I have some solar data trickling into the system…..
Right now the Opto controller is sitting on the outside lounge suite because Freddy has not yet chosen her seat/cupboard which it will be installed (hidden) into. Also there might be a network cable strung from the garage, through the kitchen, into the dining room, across the floor and up through a window in the lounge… oddly enough it comes out right near the outside lounge suite. What’s the chances of that?

At the moment I have nothing more than a few temperatures and the first panel voltage.
The grid tie inverter (and network cables) arrive this afternoon.
I will not have time to do anything with it before sun set, so it can all wait till Saturday night or Sunday morning.

Here is what I am seeing thus far.

Interesting because you can clearly see the solar panel voltage (yellow pen) drop as soon as the temperature of the panel goes up.
Not a lot. Around 2%, but also this is with no load. (The green line is amps, it’s at zero).

Check out that solar panel temperature…. we saw a max of 70.3C on the back of the panel (That’s 160F). Phew.

Anyway, just thought I would share it with you lot.
The Amazon order should get the power from one panel (255w) going into the system. I am working on the math to give me a number of how efficient the inverter is and of course I will have it sensored up so we will lots of data from it.

The other two panels (around 500 watts) will take a little longer to get going, but we will get there… In the mean time I have some software and groov graphics to get sorted.

We have had a bit of a heat wave the past week… The past weekend was both the highest and last of it. Sat and Sun were both around 42C.
Inside jobs were the solution for us.

For a while I have been wanting to rebuild my aircraft tracking laptop, just a major clean up. While I was doing it, it occurred to me that the computer does not need to be in the garage, it could sit in the study (Terrys computer room) and thus also take care of the weather station software as well as airplanes.

As I was just about done, Freddy made the good point that the same computer could also run groov and thus we could put the other garage laptop to sleep when it was not playing music.

Yes, all my eggs are now in one basket. I figure I am pretty safe since I know a guy (just the one) that likes Windows and seems to think its pretty reliable and yet his weather station data is stuck at the 4th of Jan 2015…..

Anyway, the whole point of doing this is to consolidate some computers and thus cut back on the base load power that our house draws in off the grid.

Mission accomplished.
Our house baseload for the longest time has always been around 800 watts.
It was pretty nice to see that yesterday afternoon, we saw a new low of 664 watts. (And for the most part seems to bounce around 700ish).

I am looking at moving some video cameras around and thus being able to shut off one of my old PC’s. That should be good for another 80-100watts.
We will keep looking and seeing what we can shut off or consolidate.

Still working on the solar stuff, but every watt saved, is another we can replace with solar when we get that installed.