Image is a graph from the electric company showing my usage for a day this week. From 6:30 AM to 8:30 PM we used absolutely no utility power.

I’m almost at the three week mark for having this system up and running. The first two weeks I only had 3 KW of PV input but I added another 5 panels to bring it up to 4 KW last week. It’s also still running from a transfer switch in “off grid” mode because I don’t yet have the prep work done to move my breaker box and start moving circuits to it. (That means I’m either on full solar+battery or utility, no mixing or load sharing).

Once I get it wired in fully, I’m probably going to switch to time-of-use billing. Unfortunately, I can’t do that ahead of time because rather than just making off-peak use cheaper, it makes peak usage (M-F 7am to 9pm) extremely expensive while off peak dirt cheap. I wish there was a middle option, but it is what it is.

I’m also being very conservative with my battery usage since I want to have at least 50% in “reserve” to cover power outages. That’s especially important during these heat waves. We could easily run 24/7 but would have to take a day off every so often to just let it charge back up since my system is a bit too small to cover all our usage indefinitely (at least if we want to run the A/C for comfort, that is).

      • zergtoshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        3 hours ago

        Wow, that’s rather massive!
        Have you considered bringing an EV with V2H function into the mix?

        • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websiteOPEnglish
          4·
          2 hours ago

          Planning on getting an EV eventually but haven’t explored V2H. Could possibly use it as a second level backup or use it as the reserve and use my house batteries fully rather than treating them as empty when they hit 50% (saving the bottom half of them for emergencies).

          But yeah, having an EV is still a good ways off (2-3 years minimum) so haven’t thought too much about it. AFAIK, nothing about my setup “paints me into a corner” such that I wouldn’t be able to use that functionality.

          • zergtoshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            2 hours ago

            Your setup sounds great for including V2H, which would add another big amount of kWh to your electric energy storage - depending on the EV and its battery.
            Take into consideration that not all EVs support V2H, but that might change a bit within the next few years.