Sorry to hear that. It sounds like inverters failing is the most common issue to come up with solar in general and sounds way too frequent/early in the lifespan of a system. What brand does Tesla use for theirs?
Anticlimactic ...very nice technician showed up today did diagnostics removed and replaced a box on my roof perhaps half size of a loaf of bread and was in and out in under an hour.
Things looking good again. I would be 100% off grid but the water heater uses grid power due to draw. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Do you have one of those hybrid water heaters that use waste heat via heat pump in addition to electricity?
Yes, let's do some actual math. Oh, right -- taxpayers get ****ed -- Hooray! The faux-green religion is saving the world. Only if you would be keeping that $41K in your mattress. Assuming that you could make 3% per year on that $41K (very conservative), and that electricity costs increase by 3% per year (it won't be that much), the actual payback period is a little over 14 years (assuming that you have zero repair/maintenance costs over that time -- good luck with that)...
Massive surprise price increases. Lots in the 50% range. https://electrek.co/2021/04/11/tesla-hikes-solar-roof-price-on-contracts-signed-over-a-year-ago/
Plus don't forget I live in the mountains between Los Gatos and Scotts Valley and don't have LP and ABSOLUTELY need back up power so going the generator route is not feasible for me (smallish house and no room for LP or a generator without a hassle). Having the battery back up has been amazing. I love looking at the app and seeing 99% off grid as well during the summer. Wish the wholesale rate on my sale of excess was better......yesterday I was 99% off grid and gave back 21.3kwh. January 19th was a Pain in the rear end.....
I have no problem with you doing whatever works for you, but I have a HUGE problem with taxpayers getting screwed by the faux-green religion doing things that actually do nothing to reduce civilization's fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions. My post was just to point out that your math for calculating the payback period greatly underestimates the payback time period. Where the cost of transmission is high, it makes sense to have an expensive local small generation system, but it's not like you are isolated in the Northwest Territories. If using Solar PV makes sense, it makes far more sense to do it at scale in large farms rather than everyone owning their own little Solar PV power station.
Have you noticed any difference in the water quality with the ozonater system? I've been thinking about getting one of these for laundry https://o3waterworks.com/products/laundry-system I keep seeing it on Instagram and Facebook with endless comments of its great success. Aqueous ozone however is only supposed to be effective for cold water. It may be worth looking into a hybrid tank water heater as well. I have a tankless gas unit I just replaced and also swapped the old electric 2007 50 gal tank unit that came with the house with the hybrid electric tank (linked below if interested). I wanted to have redundancy between gas and electric so always have hot water even if power or gas is out. The old 50 gal electric tank unit was drawing 3-6 kWh per day and the new hybrid unit draws less than 1 kWh a day with most days being well below 0.5 kwh. I have mine in the attic (it's a thing in texas apparently) and it operates as a heat pump drawing in the exterior hot air to heat the water and expels cool air. May be worth looking into as a far lower power draw option for at least a zone in the house of hot water. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Rheem-ProTerra-50-Gal-10-Year-Hybrid-High-Efficiency-Smart-Tank-Electric-Water-Heater-with-Leak-Detection-Auto-Shutoff-XE50T10HS45U0/312741462
Eric, Are you pumping ground water into a tank? If yes, what time of day are you doing this at? If you have the flexibility, you should consider pumping between midnight and 6AM to get the .11 to .12 cents/kwh charge from the grid; that could reduce your overall grid charges if your forced to use PGE.
Yes, our well draws into a 3k gallon tank. Your strategy is sound especially if/when I didn’t have the use of the PowerWall2 battery packs. here is yesterday’s chart of just grid usage. The only above baseline is when I took a shower and the hot water heater draws too much for the PowerWall2 Image Unavailable, Please Login
Here is what yesterday looked like in total Generated 41.9kwh House used 17.2kwh Took 10.6kwh from backup Gave 15.1kwh to backup Gave the grid my excess 21.3kwh Took 1.1kwh from the grid for my shower. Image Unavailable, Please Login
As a comparison for yesterday ...since we live close by: * produced 40.3 kwhs * used 8 kwhs from grid (to charge the Chevy Volt from midnight to 3AM) * we typically use about 10 to 15 khrs/day average throughout year ...if AC/Heat not running; like yesterday * hvac usage is by far the biggest energy device / variable in our household...more so with the past several years - increasingly higher summer temps and the time windows increasing throughout the year Hence, heating/cooling was the final item in our house that I could experiment and optimize in order to reduce electricity usage. All the other curious and fun games to reduce power / energy usage has been completed. So.... As an experiment, I installed a 6speed ceiling fan above our staircase. I had been researching and reading about moving heated / cooled air columns from the first floor to second floor and visa versa. The theory is that in the Summer you run the ceiling fan clockwise to pull first floor "cooler" air columns into the second floor to blend and cool the warm/hot air that rose to second floor; Winter time run ceiling fan counter clockwise to push warmed air down to first floor in order to blend and warm "cooler" air. I started this experiment this past November. I didn't take baseline measurements, but I can definitely say we rarely turned on hvac since November, and we had 34 degree temps this past winter and 98 degree temps 4 weeks ago per the digital thermometer. Once we get to Nov 2021 (a full year of ceiling fan usage), I will run a PGE year over year comparison to get accurate $ and khr usage numbers. At current course and speed this ceiling fan paid for itself in the first 10 days of this past winter and the overall house temp is MUCH more comfortable as opposed to getting to this same comfort running the hvac system for long period of time.....just another thing to think about as you play the generate/consume optimization game. BTW, we have a two zone hvac system and we feel a material difference for the better without the hvac running and using the ceiling fan (nonstop).
Tonight I bought a Ford Lightning 2023 Lariat with the 511A big battery option..,,going to have sunrun do the hardware to allow me to power the house with the truck during extended outages…..wish me luck….
