Random Renewables Thread

Also, sorry for the long post.

TLDR version, everyone in a position to make decisions is stupid and buy solar panels while you can

A lot of those boyos think they'll have it sorted as long as they have a bit of petrol and a cheap genny. It might get them out of a hole if they badly need to make a cup of coffee during a rolling blackout of a few hours, but with anything more serious they are stuffed.

I noticed if the power goes for more than about 12 hours here things go downhill rapidly. The mains water pressure will go within the first day, so you need some way of pumping water out of a stream and then pumping it into the tank in the attic. Your local friendly Telecom Eireann exchange will go into some fallback mode where it only supports voice calls made using a bakelite landline telephone machine. After a day it won't even support those anymore, if you are lucky some crew will show up with a genny to bring the exchange back online but they'll be run off their feet and it will be a while before they get around to it. Next to go is your mobile phone coverage. Though you will notice some deterioration of service within the first hours most likely.

Once you start running low on fuel rock up to the local shop where you'll find the pumps not working. The shop itself will be eerily dark because it has feck all windows, you may still be able to buy some non perishable items if you are lucky.

I'll be honest, when I get solar installed I'll probably get a generator hook up installed as well. It's nice to have as a just in case

But as @Ubbquittious said you need somewhere to store fuel.

I reckon I'd probably use about 10.5l of fuel a day if I didn't cut down on my energy usage much. Realistically I'd be cutting down as much as I could but it's hard to avoid some high consumption when all of my heating and cooking is electric

So a couple of jerry cans could see me through a week or so of total power cuts probably. Of course if it's gotten that bad then the power is probably never coming on, in which case all those apocalypse preppers are going to be having the time of their lives

Anyone who has the hybrid inverter/battery system will be only laughing at the rest of us struggling, at least until we get a few dark days in a row. Particularly if they have a changeover switch and their own well. I have a small off the grid system with some batteries and 1kW inverter but you can't run a whole lot off that.

Things will get ugly fast if the grid goes down for more than a day or two. During lockdown the takeaways stayed open but they might not be able to this time. A sizeable cohort of society will be "losing their sh1t". A lot of people have no backup at all

Actually I'm going to rant some more 😂

I decided to go to the office today (God only knows why I bothered) and there's about 5 people on my floor out of probably 200-300 desks

All the lights are on and the heating is set to a balmy 23C

The other floors are a little busier but I'm pretty sure they could fit everyone in work today onto one floor of one building (there's 4 buildings total)

How big a waste of energy is that in the middle of a crisis?

Companies all over Ireland should be forced to use a desk allocation system and only heat the floors that are needed

After 5pm the office should be shut down and the heating set down to 16C or something just to stop any frost building up. Everyone should be told to piss off home and stop working

I don't think you can mandate people to piss off home at 5pm. Many of us work flexible hours and if I need a defibulator to get out of bed at 8am, I can go in at 10am and work later and that helps. Others need to drop off/pick up the kids, so there's external factors that dictate the hours they work.

That said, there is no reason that temperatures need to be above 20C. The fact that you have yours at 23C is a bit bonkers. Someone needs to get onto your facilities manager and get that changed and probably "locked" so that your average employee can't move it beyond 21C. I'd have it set to 19C, but that's a personal comfort level.

My pet peve is the monitors. I often head home later in the evening from the office and I'd see 10-20 monitiors left on. Granted they aren't the juice sucking fiends their CRT brothers were 20 years ago, but still each one probably 50-100w and for nothing. Why someone cant reach for literally 2 seconds and hit the power button, beyond me.

It's worse that that mate - we've a "group policy" in active directory which sets the sleep timeout value on the monitors. The fact that someone has them on means that they've over ridden the value set in the registry. We give people the power to do that, but really they're just being kleps, on a number of fronts.

I never tried it but I imagine because there is nowhere for the excess power to go the voltage will rise quickly and it will decide to cut out. It could in theory work if you designed a dump load that prevents the voltage rising too much. The eddi will do feck all because it's current sensor will be reading 0 all the time if there is nowhere to export to

What are people's thoughts on heat batteries like the Sunamp?

Are they worth the bother if you already have a decent hot water cylinder?

My main goal with it would be to store up heat either from excess solar or using night rate and then discharge it during the day in winter

EDIT: Probably worth mentioning that the house is heated with a heat pump already

AFAIK you can get both but open to correction. I was gifted a single ring counter top one by a fellow boardsie and found it reduced electricity use by a good amount so will be buying a full size one in the sales. Cooking times greatly reduced.

I had looked into these earlier this year and your spot on -- it would be far cheaper to buy a top notch water cylinder.

If the sunamp prices came down then it could be a contender in a newbuild/refub situation.

Yeah I kinda suspected they were duty cycle based, pretty much every appliance is it seems

I was thinking one might be a good way to avoid that peak load from the electric hob and help stay within the output of the solar panels

I was also looking at sunamp recently but given it still needs a heat source didn't see the point of it over a water cylinder. Has anyone looked at the Tepeo Zero Emission Boiler ?

https://tepeo.com/thezeb

Hmm, sounds like a crate of CALB cells is better value per kWh of energy storage