Ted's Blog

I was looking around on Amazon at solar generators and saw a EBL Acc2400 solar power station for $500. It has 1840 Wh of storage, which is a little less than the Aferiy, but it allows up to 800 watts of solar charging (vs. 500). It’s not like I need another one, but it seemed like a good alternative that I should know about. It looks lower quality than the Aferiy, bigger and heavier with a more basic screen and no control via an app, but it has the same battery type (LiFePO4), lots of ports, and adds wireless charging. Based on a couple of reviews it also has the same 20-30 watt or so idle drain, which means you waste a lot of power if you want to power something all day. Having two generators would let me connect one panel to each and get the full wattage from each of the 425 watt panels instead of capping it at a combined 500, which is what happens now.

As I searched for reviews of it I also got shopping results that said I could get one for $210 at AliExpress. That’s a third of what I paid for the Aferiy. While I don’t want to continue pouring more money into my solar system, it was such a good deal that it could easily pay for itself. Having ordered flashlights direct from China for years I knew you had to be really careful ordering from places like AliExpress. I had actually bought a flashlight at AliExpress a few years ago so I already had an account. I decided to go ahead and buy it for delivery in mid-October from China. I also found a deal at Temu, which is similar, but when I went to that page, it was actually a page for several different generators and the one that was cheap was actually a much lower capacity generator even though the whole page was all about the more expensive one.

I started wondering what the catch could be and thought about tariffs. I had been charged about 8% for “local taxes” which would fit if they were going to pay state sales tax, but Aliexpress didn’t mention any other taxes. It seems like from what I am reading that AliExpress doesn’t always charge you up front or even tell you whether or how much a tariff will be and it can add 40% to the price after you have paid and the product ships (the shipping company would charge me, not AliExpress). 40% would add another $80, getting the total price up to $300. Still a good deal compared to the one for $500 at Amazon, but not as good.

Looking at the listing again and getting more worried about this too good to be true purchase, I saw that they also had a tiny thumbnail that was clicked and if you clicked the thumbnail of the Acc2400, which, again, the entire page showed pictures and descriptions of, the price changed to $500. The icons looked pretty much identical, but they were actually selling three different models, just like Temu. I thought maybe I could wait and hope for the best, but AliExpress seems to feel like if they send you something that works, even if it isn’t what you ordered, that you should only get a partial refund or you can pay to send it back to them for a full refund (a 60 pound package sent back to China?). I looked up the specs on the lower priced generators and they aren’t something I would ever want, not even capable of dealing with the wattage that one of my solar panels produces.

I started an online chat with the seller (not actually AliExpress, since they seem to ba all about third party sellers, this one called Sun Furniture) and asked to confirm which model was in my order. The next morning they confirmed it was the lowest model with only 500 Wh of storage instead of 1800. Bait and switch all the way, but I think Amazon does something similar that you have to be really careful of where they sell multiple versions of a product on the same page and you have to look closely to make sure you are clicked on the product you want. At Amazon even if you change the size or color of a shirt, the price can change.

Anyway, lesson learned. Never order anything from AliExpress. I told the customer service person in the chat that the entire page was about the Acc 2400 and that I didn’t want the 500 Wh model and asked if I could cancel. I went ahead and canceled anyway via Aliexpress, but they wait for 48 hours to hear back from the seller. Later that day customer service said yes, I could cancel, but I still worried they might ship anyway. After 48 hours, Aliexpress did cancel the order and they have said they have issued a refund.

I thought maybe I could make a dent in my home electricity usage by buying a couple of solar panels and a solar generator. A solar generator is a battery that can be charged up and has USB, AC electrical, and DC ports that you can use like a gas-powered generator. My electrical usage isn’t that high, maybe 300 kilowatt-hours per month on average, so that only comes out to 10 kWh per day. There are a number of solar generators out there that can store 2 kWh, so if I could fill one of those every day and use that power, I could save 20% of my electricity, however, the cost of 2 kWh only comes out to about 34 cents per day. Still, that’s $10 a month or $120 a year, so eventually a system could pay for itself.

Continue reading “Small Solar Power System”

While researching Georgia Power’s rates and shopping for a solar generator, I found out Georgia Power has a program called Overnight Advantage that you can sign up for which charges different amounts depending on what time of day you use power, with really low rates overnight (2.2 cents per kwh nominally as opposed to the standard rate of 8.1 cents). Then you pay higher than normal rates of 10.2 cents during waking hours 7 AM to 11 PM and then really high rates of 29.8 cents at peak 2-7 PM Monday thru Friday. This program might be good if you charge your electric car overnight. Electric cars have batteries of 50 kwh or more so you want the best discount on that that you can get. 2.2 cents makes it sound like you can fill up your car for a little over a dollar, but with fees and taxes, it would actually cost you about $4 to fill up your car. Still, really cheap, and even on a regular plan it would be only $8. However it could also work if you have a large home battery that you lets you run your house with stored power. I doubt that would work out for a 2 kwh battery, especially not in summer when AC use drives my power consumption up to 20 kwh per day. Home batteries are really expensive, like $6,000 to cover my 10 kwh daily usage and would need another one in Summer for air conditioning. I only use $800 of power a year.

However, it does kind of bring up the idea of bi-directional charging for electric cars, where you use your car as a home battery, charging it at night and then letting it power your entire house during the day. And taking it further, if you filled up your car overnight with 50 kwh at 2 cents per kwh, you could use 20 kwh from the car to run your house very cheaply all day and then sell another 20 kwh back to the utilty at the peak at a much higher price than you paid (Georgia Power does not do this, but they should). If Georgia Power is going to charge you 29.8 cents for peak power, wouldn’t they be willing to buy peak power from you for 15 cents? You could still make a good profit on what you sell back to them. If this could work on a large scale, the world would be a better place because we would burn less fuel and need fewer power plants. Using batteries, not even solar power, though obviously it works even better with solar. However, in places like California where about a third of the electricity is solar already, the disparity in peak and off peak prices isn’t as much because during the daytime they are generating a lot of solar, though it is still a demand peak so rates are maybe twice the off peak rates.

Getting free power from the sun has always been an appealing idea for me, but costs have always been high. Costs have come down a lot over the years, but it would probably still cost me $10,000 to install meaningful solar at my house and since I only use about $800 of electricity per year, that would take too long to pay off. Going off the grid is even more expensive because then you have to have a way to store the power in a battery to use at night or when demand is higher than what you are getting from the sun. Instead, for years I have paid Georgia Power a little extra to receive solar power (or, really, Renewable Energy Credits). At one time I thought I could get a small solar panel and hook it up to a car battery and then use the car battery to charge my phone or my laptop or whatever, and have a small and simple system, but a phone uses only a few cents of power per day and car batteries don’t last forever, so it seemed like that might not work either.

Continue reading “Solar Power at Home”

I am now in my tenth year on Georgia Power’s Simple Solar plan which charges me about 10% more than regular customers and all of my electricity is solar. Sort of. Really I am buying Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), which are an accounting gimmick so that you can buy and sell solar energy credits. The RECs are purchased from someone producing solar energy and then they use or sell the electricity back to the grid. It is like buying a carbon offset. But if a big company wants to run its factory on solar and builds a 1 megawatt solar plant to run it, it would probably say it is running the factory on solar, but I bet it would still sell the RECs. So it is kind of second hand solar. RECs are fairly cheap to buy which is why I am not paying that much. Still maybe it means something. Georgia Power’s mix of electricity sources is now up to 7% solar, which is better than in the past, but not great.

Georgia Power also has a program called Community Solar where you pay $24 per month to buy the output of a 1000 watt block of actual solar cells that Georgia Power operates somewhere in Georgia. Georgia Power then lets you reduce your power bill by the actual number of kilowatt-hours those cells produce, which they say on average is 165 kWh per month, but can vary from 115 to 215 kWh. At first glance it looks like this would generally save me money, but it isn’t easy calculating the costs.

Continue reading “Community Solar”