Almost. 1st of the year, pretty please?

JRHill · February 10

@ 96.4% for solar for the day. Just a little more?!? Maybe if I hadn't done 2 loads on the extra heavy duty cycle? This is a celebratory thing each year to began transitioning from the nightly generator run. Absolutely a calendar item. Up to 10:04 of daylight now. Soon it will be summer drought and xxxF.

96.9 now... down the last bit of the home stretch (play music).

SumPower · February 11

Glad that the sun is finally shining on your panels. Lets hope it continues with little cloud cover!

SumPower · February 25

Hoping for that 100% and charge parameters met again today. First day with no clouds for a couple of weeks, and seeing blue sky during sunrise as it cleared the mountain that causes a shadow on our solar panels until aprox 9:00am through mid February. Its like, this is the day the Lord has made! I usually get to coast for the rest of the year after seeing the sun above that mountain.

Looking squarely at that full battery charge minus a generator run for the rest of the year!

JRHill · February 25

SumPower said:

Hoping for that 100% and charge parameters met again today. First day with no clouds for a couple of weeks, and seeing blue sky during sunrise as it cleared the mountain that causes a shadow on our solar panels until aprox 9:00am through mid February. Its like, this is the day the Lord has made! I usually get to coast for the rest of the year after seeing the sun above that mountain.
Looking squarely at that full battery charge minus a generator run for the rest of the year!

We were on the same wavelength this morning. The dogs woke me up at 6:30 and when I walked into the main room some trees out front looked like sun was hitting them. NO WAY. I stepped out on the porch and looked to the east and the sun was low behind some far clouds and it was the bright yellow cast I was seeing out front. Beautiful! I got the coffee water heating and looked out again, literally 3 minutes later and was fogged in as the clouds lifted out of the canyon.

9:15 now and still foggy but I'm getting 600 watts from refraction.

JRHill · February 26

The batteries were full by 12:30pm so yesterday was the first official full charge via solar. It's a bit late this year. I celebrated by going to town and filling 30g into jugs for the genset. The genset will still be needed for those cloudy days until draught season starts.

I've got a line on a diesel 2400rpm 6kW single cylinder genset that I may switch to for the future. I'm sick to death of paying road tax for gasoline and always have 100g on dyed diesel on hand. While other places around the country are paying $2.20 / gal, ours is twice that and the majority of the difference is road tax.

JRHill · March 10

Update: The battery bank is getting charged most days now just from the sun. Excellent.

And with the price of fuel as it is now it was even more timely. In WA State the exorbitant amount of road use fuel tax is just ridiculous. There is a process to submit a WA tax form for the refund of fuel tax for gasoline used off road but its designed and intended to cause people to not even try. I'm leaning heavily to finding a diesel genset in the 5kW range since there's always 100g of dyed on site that I get from the depot. But for a diesel there's just not much out there for a water cooled 1800 RPM unit - and definitely nothing in an inverter.... :'(

BB. · March 10

Yamaha has an 1,800 RPM @ 125/250 VAC @ 15,000 Watt genset (don't know anything about the product):

https://global.yamaha-motor.com/business/pp/generator/lineup/220v-60hz/6-/edl15000sde/

-Bill

Dave Angelini · March 10

Yamaha just moved out of Cali. Wonder why?

JRHill · March 10

BB. said:

Yamaha has an 1,800 RPM @ 125/250 VAC @ 15,000 Watt genset (don't know anything about the product):

https://global.yamaha-motor.com/business/pp/generator/lineup/220v-60hz/6-/edl15000sde/

-Bill

Way too big of a genset, Bill. The Outback VFXR (48v) is limited to 20AAC for charging batteries. The total for pass through including charging is limited to 30AAC. So the sweet spot for us is a 5kW and it has an easy life.

The genset's primary use is to charge batteries through the OB inverter. We don't have any considerable surge loads so that is not a problem - the worst case is the wife doing an occasional bag of microwave popcorn in the evening. The inverter is set to 'SUPPORT' mode so even when the genset is running and the wife pushes the 'Start' button on the microwave there is nary a flinch. It is actually smooth as silk.

In all the years we've never popped any breaker or had the inverter error out from overload. The OB inverter is a tank and the 3600w is continuous. The surge ratings are way past anything we would cause.

A small diesel genset is an interesting market. I do NOT want a 3600 rpm diesel. But maybe a Detroit with flames coming out the exhaust? It would be fun to watch out the window in a snow storm!

JRHill · March 10

Yes, I have thought about building one with DC output. But not with LFP04 batteries.

JRHill · March 10

Dave Angelini said:

Yamaha just moved out of Cali. Wonder why?

I wonder?

johnsmith76 · March 10

You’re almost there. Once the days get a little longer you’ll likely hit that first full solar day without the generator. It’s always a nice milestone each year when the system starts carrying everything again.

JRHill · March 10

Almost. 1st of the year, pretty please?

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