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ripple4 said:
Marktm, it's good to hear your experience, is there a thread dedicated to the texas outage yet, it would be interesting to explore how micro-grid solar could have helped there, I understand it was sunny 3 of the 4 days in houston, is that correct?

As I was in the hospital recovering from major surgery during the entire event (almost 2 weeks), I don't really know. I do know that Griddy sends out email warnings about high pricing and actually recommended that members switch to another provider before the "event". As I was not checking of course, I did not switch.

Interesting that Griddy claims they will credit back any solar production to the grid - at the same energy value. That certainly would have helped if that is actually true, and one could offset thier usage (might take quite a large system with careful monitering of usage). Who knows as Griddy no longer exists as a retail provider. I'll post my response to you as a separate topic - does seem pertanent and timely.
 
danrjones said:
So i still think if they had too much daytime solar they would decrease the day cost and increase the night cost (?), and that's not what they have done. Mostly they have jacked WAY up the 2pm to 8pm costs and left the others the same.
You can learn a lot from spending some time at the CAISO website.

CA has two peaks: early AM, and ~ 4pm - 8pm
Those are periods not served by much if any PV, but do force the utility to buy expensive NG peaker plant production
Night is another matter, mostly influenced by existing long term contracts, of which many are imports.

Those long term contracts are also in play during the day but their weighted contribution is different due to PV and higher loads.
 
SageBrush said:
danrjones said:
So i still think if they had too much daytime solar they would decrease the day cost and increase the night cost (?), and that's not what they have done. Mostly they have jacked WAY up the 2pm to 8pm costs and left the others the same.
You can learn a lot from spending some time at the CAISO website.

CA has two peaks: early AM, and ~ 4pm - 8pm
Those are periods not served by much if any PV, but do force the utility to buy expensive NG peaker plant production
Night is another matter, mostly influenced by existing long term contracts, of which many are imports.

Those long term contracts are also in play during the day but their weighted contribution is different due to PV and higher loads.

Yes but my plan is 2pm to 8pm. I'm putting solar in (net) until close to 7pm right now. 8pm soon.

So by jacking up the 2pm to 8pm rate they are giving me MORE credit.

I do think the new plans are indeed 4pm to 8pm. But mine is not.

So they can raise the 2pm to 8pm price all they want and I always win because I put in more than I take out during that whole period.
 
danrjones said:
So they can raise the 2pm to 8pm price all they want and I always win because I put in more than I take out during that whole period.
You are part of a rate class that is still majority non-PV owners and PV owners that come out paying more than before; and 2, you have to look at it over a year.
 
SageBrush said:
danrjones said:
So they can raise the 2pm to 8pm price all they want and I always win because I put in more than I take out during that whole period.
You are part of a rate class that is still majority non-PV owners and PV owners that come out paying more than before; and 2, you have to look at it over a year.

I have looked across my bill for the year, and I always (over the year -> net metering!) put in more than I take out during that 2pm to 8pm time slot.

Can't imagine who (non solar) would want that particular TOU, but maybe someone who sleeps from 2pm to 8pm and works the night shift? Still would need AC though.

Our sunset last night was around 7:15 and I was putting excess power into the grid until about 6:45. Plus once I stop putting power "in" my "out" per hour is much lower than what my "in" was. On Sunday around 2pm (was fixing broken pipes in my front yard, the idiot that built the house years ago used schedule 20 pipe :evil: ), and I was dumping about 6.5 kW into the grid.

Maybe this whole conversation would be moot if SCE and other companies had grid storage . Then they would WANT our extra power.
Come on grid storage, where are you?
 
danrjones said:
SageBrush said:
danrjones said:
So they can raise the 2pm to 8pm price all they want and I always win because I put in more than I take out during that whole period.
You are part of a rate class that is still majority non-PV owners and PV owners that come out paying more than before; and 2, you have to look at it over a year.

I have looked across my bill for the year, and I always (over the year -> net metering!) put in more than I take out during that 2pm to 8pm time slot.

Can't imagine who (non solar) would want that particular TOU, but maybe someone who sleeps from 2pm to 8pm and works the night shift? Still would need AC though.

Our sunset last night was around 7:15 and I was putting excess power into the grid until about 6:45. Plus once I stop putting power "in" my "out" per hour is much lower than what my "in" was. On Sunday around 2pm (was fixing broken pipes in my front yard, the idiot that built the house years ago used schedule 20 pipe :evil: ), and I was dumping about 6.5 kW into the grid.

Maybe this whole conversation would be moot if SCE and other companies had grid storage . Then they would WANT our extra power.
Come on grid storage, where are you?
The CA IOUs have a laundry list of changes they want up before the state PUC that will make you scream. One of the least obnoxious (on a scale of 91-100) is to modify net metering to monthly true-ups.

One way or another, the IOUs are going to devalue your home PV unless *they* want it. My advice is to give some thought how to maximize self consumption. In front of the meter grid storage does not change this conversation at all if the IOU can buy PV/Wind from a source cheaper than yours. And they can, unless under 2¢ a kWh sounds good to you.
 
Come on grid storage, where are you?

Agreed, when we can set up our EVs to allow a slight draw-down by the power companies during peak load similar to the Tesla Powerwall, the EV batteries will have a further societal benefit and presumably that benefit will be acknowledged by the power company and passed along to us. In Vermont right now, Powerwall owners receive a credit for all power drawn from their storage during peak demand, and the draw-down is limited to a small percentage so the home is still electrified in case of power outage. So, plug EV into a wi-fi connected EVSE, power can flow both directions as needed, we are beginning to see a grid-scale storage..... pie in the sky I realize but it COULD happen!
 
SageBrush said:
The CA IOUs have a laundry list of changes they want up before the state PUC that will make you scream. One of the least obnoxious (on a scale of 91-100) is to modify net metering to monthly true-ups.

One way or another, the IOUs are going to devalue your home PV unless *they* want it. My advice is to give some thought how to maximize self consumption. In front of the meter grid storage does not change this conversation at all if the IOU can buy PV/Wind from a source cheaper than yours. And they can, unless under 2¢ a kWh sounds good to you.


I've seen at least part of that list. Question is open as to whether the PUC agrees with some or any of their list.

One thing, being that I did it myself and saved $$$, I installed far more than I currently use to be a bit future proof. I never expected to be a power producer and make money. SCE can keep my extra power, as long as they don't want to charge me any more fees -> they do that and I'll look for a way to go off grid.

Right now my heating is being done by an old NG furnace. It is going to need to be replaced soon, but I haven't quite made up my mind on whether I do a newer more efficient furnace or a go ahead and get a Heat pump. Right now all my AC is done by a evaporative cooler. My evap cooler has a low and high setting, and on high its pulls 1 HP plus a water pump, so ~ 750 watts plus the pump, lets say 50 watts. So 800 watts. From June through end of Aug that mostly runs on high non stop, so about 19.2 kWh per day. Obviously if I got a heat pump I could also run that as an AC, and my wife would love that, and turn off the swampy. I would need a 5 ton unit for Heat pump/AC. I tried to do some estimating before I put in my solar so that I could cover that if needed. I believe a 5 ton AC uses about 6 to 6.5 kW sustained, but obviously it wouldn't run the entire day like my swamp cooler. There are a few other issues to address as well, such as whether a heat pump would or would not need a emergency backup - a heat strip, which I would prefer to avoid, especially if I ever go off grid. Modern heat pumps go down well below 0f and I live in a dry heat and dry cold, and not really THAT cold. If I do a Heat pump system, I almost certainly will do it myself. Furnace is even easier, though I actually have seen some DIY AC systems now with pre-charged lines. No vacuuming or soldering required. I had a quote from a local company and they wanted 15k for a 17 SEER 5 ton system. :shock: No. Online you can pick up 17 SEER Heat pump for ~ $3600. I'd go for higher than 17 SEER but that seems to be the max for DIY 5 ton. I'd just keep a swamp cooler but our water prices are set to triple over the next few years and my wife likes real AC. Decisions, Decisons....

Anyway, back on topic, with potential future systems and EVs (of course!) I added extra power, and I didn't really expect SCE to pay me for it. But if they do pay me even 2 cents, that's $20 to 30 back to me during spring summer and fall. That's fine too. And if I need to go off grid, adding more solar in the future is easy. Lots of roof space left.

I'm certainly open to advice and flexible. My wife is the stick in the mud.
 
danrjones said:
My wife is the stick in the mud.
:lol:

I would never say that about my wife. Not in earshot anyway.
I have also learned to not tell my wife any quips about other women. She *always* takes it personally, as if women were one big macro-organism. Unless they are too close to each other, for then they eat each other alive. I digress ..

--

Ohmman over at TMC clued me in to some home automation software made by Indigo that I'm excited to give a try. It will let me program smart panel switches for my main loads to operate in an orchestrated fashion. For me along these lines:

When PV generating (get the current !),
Juice up the EV a bit if needed, then
Air condition the house some,
then make some hot water for the tank.

When done,
Air condition the house some more, then
make some more hot water

STILL PV ? then
Make hot water until full, and then over Air condition the house for time shifting
 
danrjones said:
Right now my heating is being done by an old NG furnace. It is going to need to be replaced soon, but I haven't quite made up my mind on whether I do a newer more efficient furnace or a go ahead and get a Heat pump. Right now all my AC is done by a evaporative cooler. My evap cooler has a low and high setting, and on high its pulls 1 HP plus a water pump, so ~ 750 watts plus the pump, lets say 50 watts. So 800 watts. From June through end of Aug that mostly runs on high non stop, so about 19.2 kWh per day. Obviously if I got a heat pump I could also run that as an AC, and my wife would love that, and turn off the swampy. I would need a 5 ton unit for Heat pump/AC. I tried to do some estimating before I put in my solar so that I could cover that if needed. I believe a 5 ton AC uses about 6 to 6.5 kW sustained, but obviously it wouldn't run the entire day like my swamp cooler.

In the planning phase it might helpful to not look at the real power, which is the nameplate values on motors etc, but instead the apparent power of your appliances. as you may know, apparent power is 'real' power plus 'reactive' power, or real power divided by the power factor. with grid-tie you may have been living in a real power dreamland, where motors start easily without dimming the lights, and all motors are created equal perhaps (PSC, ECM, induction) etc. also those large condenser units you are looking at with PSC motors will have a starting current that is going to be impossible to meet with an inverter. my 3-ton condenser unit compressor has an LRA of 155amps, you'll need an ECM (inverter drive) compressor for off grid. In an off-grid situation the inverters supplies apparent power, so when summing all your loads you need to divide the nameplate value by the power factor, or better yet measure it with an amp clamp meter. Recently, I just power factor corrected some of my often used appliances so that my inverter had to work less hard, my gas dryer motor had a power factor of .45, so it was drawing '670va' of current while doing 300w of work. with a 75uf run capacitor I got it to .90PF which dropped the AC current draw by 3 amps. here is the website i use to calculate what capacitor to use. https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/power-factor-calculator.html

One item i'm keeping my eye on is this product. if it works out like they advertise it will be a big deal, since it will create reactive power and make everything better. https://www.maxoutrenewables.com/evergrid
 
ripple4 said:
danrjones said:
Right now my heating is being done by an old NG furnace. It is going to need to be replaced soon, but I haven't quite made up my mind on whether I do a newer more efficient furnace or a go ahead and get a Heat pump. Right now all my AC is done by a evaporative cooler. My evap cooler has a low and high setting, and on high its pulls 1 HP plus a water pump, so ~ 750 watts plus the pump, lets say 50 watts. So 800 watts. From June through end of Aug that mostly runs on high non stop, so about 19.2 kWh per day. Obviously if I got a heat pump I could also run that as an AC, and my wife would love that, and turn off the swampy. I would need a 5 ton unit for Heat pump/AC. I tried to do some estimating before I put in my solar so that I could cover that if needed. I believe a 5 ton AC uses about 6 to 6.5 kW sustained, but obviously it wouldn't run the entire day like my swamp cooler.

In the planning phase it might helpful to not look at the real power, which is the nameplate values on motors etc, but instead the apparent power of your appliances. as you may know, apparent power is 'real' power plus 'reactive' power, or real power divided by the power factor. with grid-tie you may have been living in a real power dreamland, where motors start easily without dimming the lights, and all motors are created equal perhaps (PSC, ECM, induction) etc. also those large condenser units you are looking at with PSC motors will have a starting current that is going to be impossible to meet with an inverter. my 3-ton condenser unit compressor has an LRA of 155amps, you'll need an ECM (inverter drive) compressor for off grid. In an off-grid situation the inverters supplies apparent power, so when summing all your loads you need to divide the nameplate value by the power factor, or better yet measure it with an amp clamp meter. Recently, I just power factor corrected some of my often used appliances so that my inverter had to work less hard, my gas dryer motor had a power factor of .45, so it was drawing '670va' of current while doing 300w of work. with a 75uf run capacitor I got it to .90PF which dropped the AC current draw by 3 amps. here is the website i use to calculate what capacitor to use. https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/power-factor-calculator.html

One item i'm keeping my eye on is this product. if it works out like they advertise it will be a big deal, since it will create reactive power and make everything better. https://www.maxoutrenewables.com/evergrid

I'm not an EE, but I am at least familiar with power factor. Normally I wouldn't concern myself with it unless I was looking at big three phase motors, i wouldn't have thought about things like my Dishwasher or Dryer. I was aware the startup amps on a compressor are high, but honestly I was going to worry about that later. Seems like something a capacitor kit for your outside unit can solve.


I would imagine, though could be totally wrong, that my 1 HP Swampy motor is the biggest sinner at the moment. Its 240v but single phase.

Still have no idea what direction I will go anyway. I really don't want a heat 15 kW heat strip. A new furnace with a heat pump could work but it adds cost for a furnace I might never use, given today's efficient heat pumps. The heating issue (replacing the old furnace) is really my driving factor, as my swamp cooler itself works just fine, other than increasing water prices and comfort issues.
 
That's right, factories have to pay for reactive power, so they try to add PFC to keep their bill down. residential users get reactive power for *almost* free, however off grid, I need to make it myself. adding capacitors inside of each appliance (switched with the load) is OK, but they don't have the fault current abilities of old-fashioned rotating mass, which is why that evergrid, or something like it is going to be awesome.

For the heating conundrum, I can offer what i have looked at. I've also got a older 80%AFUE NG furnace and it might translate to your situation. So the analysis i did was look at how many BTUs I get per dollar and compare the furnace to the Daizuki 1-ton inverter mini-split that i'm looking to buy at on amazon for $650. I also calculated your resistance heater for reference. Now where I live we have 'hell week' in the middle of February, where depending on the polar vortex its either cold, or deadly cold, so I plan on 0F or -20F for that week. And so a heat pump, even a defrosting one, will not work for that time period for me. but it will work the other 4.5 months i'm adding some heat. here is the cost breakdown.

1) Resistance heat at $.142/kWh will give 24,500btu/$. (at $.62/kWh its only 5503btu/$)
2) Natural gas at my contracted rate of $.303/CCF (and 80% eff) is 250,000 BTUs/$. (6x more heat/$ than resistance)
3) The (19seer/9.5 HPSR) heat pump heat at my contracted electric utility cost of $.142/kWh I get 73,500 BTU/$ (3x better than resistance heat but 2x the price of natural gas.)
4) but the best is for last, the same heat pump heat at my marginal cost of solar of $.02/kWh (lifetime) I get 550,000 BTU/$!

So adding solar panels in the way I previously described, optimizing winter collection and balancing morning evening collection can heat for less than half the price of natural gas. The inverter heat pump runs continuously as well, so even if its only 12kbtu running flat out will add about the same amount of heat per hour as a 80kbtu furnace cycling on 7 minutes twice per hour, which is typical for outdoor temps in the 20-30F range for me. even if you had to use gas or resistance heat to get through a few days of a cold snap, your going to be saving so much more in the mild weather heating that it may not even be important.
 
Some good info up there.

I found a website to run a manual J or load calc for my house, so I'm playing with that right now. I'm also going to look to see how much natural gas and hence heating I did last winter, to figure out ~ how many BTUs I would REALLY need. Looking at the load calcs my biggest issue is my old windows.

1) So my morning power until 8am is 0.15 per kWh. After that my solar kicks in, though not sure if it could cover the full load of a 5 ton unit. I have some numbers I found for a unit I'm eying ,showing the BTU output at specific outside temps, and the kWh consumption. I'll put that data below. So my cost per kWh would be much lower unless I'm running from 2 pm to 8pm and have run out of power to trade via "net" metering. Assuming I'm still using net metering.

2) Your gas seems really cheap? I had to look up my gas cost. PGE is "Tiered" meaning the more you use the more you pay. For January I paid 155.93 for 87 therms. Technically they charge $1.59 per therm for tier 1 and $2.03 per therm for tier 2 (price seems to fluctuate though by month), so I'm rolling everything on my bill into the final number. $1.792 per therm I used, or ~ 55800 BTU per $ delivered to my furnace, or 44,640 BTU / $ heating my house if my old furnace is 80%. I do use some for my water heater and our gas stove and our drier, but those amount to $15-$20 a month or so during the summer.

3) Here are the numbers for the unit I was looking at:

Outdoor Temp / BTU Produced / kW Used (Heating Mode)
5f 44000 7.160
17f 49000 7.100
32f 54000 6.600

We rarely get much below 20, and it quickly warms up once the sun is up. We can easily be 25f and 60f in the same day.

Outdoor Temp / BTU Removed / kW Used (Cooling Mode)
95f 55000 5.410
105f 54000 6.650
115f 46000 5.700

Conversely, during the summer we are above 100f during the day for long stretches and occasionally hit 114f or higher. But its a dry heat.

Now I just need to map out my solar production to see how much at what time I'm getting for offset. I have net metering, so its by period right now. 10pm to 8am Rate1, 8am to 2pm and 8pm to 10pm Rate2, and 2pm to 8pm Rate 3. It is "net" for those periods. I have a good daily and monthly estimate of what my new system produces, but need to see how that all lines up in the time periods.
 
Sure can.

Start here, put it in the closest city to you (you can adjust the temps later anyway).
Then fill out your structure types. I only used side 1. I am not sure what the second column (right side) is for, maybe a second floor? N/A for me. After you choose your structure, insultation, window type, and walls, the next page has you put in your square feet and linear feet for each wall, door, window, etc. Calculate Load. Then you can click "Size Equipment" where you put in your prospective HVAC numbers and it tells you if it is sufficient. Other tabs there as well.

https://www.loadcalc.net/index.php
 
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