Ted's Blog – Can't tell you more than I told you already?

Solar Powered Dryer

I finished my solar panel installation and have settled into a routine that lets me make good use of whatever electricity I can store in my battery to run my refrigerator and microwave and still charge my phone and electronics. It is not efficient to power things with the battery 24/7 since it uses 30 watts just to operate and only collects maybe 1500 watt-hours. So almost half of the power is just wasted. Lately I haven’t had enough power to run the fridge all night, so that saves me 240 watt-hours of waste and means I am only wasting about a third of the power.

In reviewing my daily consumption of electricity to see what kind of results I am getting, I noticed that some days had big spikes of usage, especially pronounced in the Fall since I have a very low baseline of 4-6 kilowatt-hours a day. For instance last week I had a day where I used 17 kwh. It turns out that was laundry day. I got a new LG washer and downloaded their app that lets me know when a cycle is complete, but it also tracks how much power is used. To run a load in the washing machine, surprisingly, only takes 100 watt-hours, not very much. But to dry that load takes anywhere from 1000 to 2000 watt-hours even though the high efficiency washer is supposed to spin as much water as possible out of the clothes first. Even if the battery had enough power stored to run the dryer (which it usually does not), the dryer runs on 240V AC, and the battery can only go up to 120V. My goal with the battery is to generate and use 2000 watt-hours per day, but I realized that if I just used a clothesline for drying, a $25 investment could save as much energy as my $1600 solar panel system. So I started thinking about that. I remember Mom and other people in our neighborhood hanging clothes out to dry in the backyard and I found remnants of what I think were clothesline posts in my backyard.

Rooftop Solar

I have had my two solar panels in the driveway getting power every day since June. My plan was to eventually put them on the roof if they worked (which they do) but it would require a building permit and I didn’t want to do it during the summer when it was too hot on the roof and in the attic where I would be running cables. I also had to request permission from the historic preservation board. Their main concern was whether it would be visible from the street or by neighbors and for the most part it is not. Not long after that I got a building permit, but I still have to get the work inspected, which may not go well since there are a ton of rules about rooftop solar installations, though most of that is because people are generating thousands of watts instead of hundreds like me. Plus those big installation tie into the grid or at least the home electrical panel and mine does not since it just powers a battery and I run stuff from the battery.

Plug-in Solar

I have been playing around with solar power, buying two 425-watt panels and a power station that can store 2 kilowatt-hours of power. However the power station is limited to 500 watts of input, so I am often wasting power. It is still helpful to have both panels if I want to have any chance of filling the power station in a day. The power station was $600, the same price as both panels, so it would be nice if you didn’t have to buy your own storage. Plug-in solar is a way of feeding solar power directly into your house through a standard electrical outlet. Because a 15-amp household electrical circuit can only carry 1800 watts, the system has to be sort of small, often capped at 1200 watts. A plug-in solar setup has a solar panel, an inverter to convert DC solar power into AC, and a plug. Utilities don’t like it because if your power line is severed, the end of the line coming from your house will be electrified. If the line is severed past the local transformer, your 120 volt could be multiplied substantially. Newer and better inverters monitor the household power and if they sense a blackout, they immediately cut power, so this is something that has been solved. Accordingly a few states have made this legal.

AliExpress

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.

Small Solar Power System

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.