January 28th 2020

420 Watts More?

I talk a lot about solar, and some of you just roll your eyes, so I just thought I would show the difference a couple of extra panels. The only difference is the panels, we have not moved, and both days are nothing but sunshine, the new panels were installed by about noon yesterday, but I had to pick up a couple of connectors to wire them in so they did not start adding to the cause until about 1:30, and I had to reset the controllers to work properly as you may notice by the pattern forming at the far right of this snapshot. Sorry the amperage and battery level are opposite to the ones below…

Here is a snapshot of solar life, this is from 8 am to 10 am on the 27th of January. The blue line shows the battery usage, while the brown line shows the amperage. The purple arrow shows where the solar first started to add to the batteries. The green points out when the beverage fridge kicked on, notice the big draw to start the compressor. The red indicates toasting bread for breakfast. The yellow arrow was the fresh water pump, also at the bottom of the toaster operation. And the orange is the solar recharging the battery bank.

This is a snapshot of the same time on the 28th of January. The blue and brown show the same information. Generally very similar with the big difference being the blue line and the sharper uptick in the battery recharging. The scaling on the brown amperage line is different because of a short usage of the microwave (which is a large draw) to soften the butter…lol. The same refrigerator cycling, water pump, and of course our toast at about 9 o’clock. About the same time the solar stops the discharging of the batteries.

The difference in the above two snap shots is the addition of 420 watts of solar just show the improvement. With sunrise at 7:35 am we did not start putting power into the batteries till 9:00 am, then the toaster pulled a full 6 amp/hours before the solar started adding power again, in fact if you look close on the top snapshot you can see that the first batch of toast was put back down (I like my toast a little darker), then the spike while Miss Laurie’s toast was started. The draw spike for the beverage fridge in the basement is quite severe but only cycles on about every 45 minutes, and runs for about six minutes as seen in the amperage draw brown line. Even with the two extra panels by 4:45 pm we are falling into a negative amperage, sunset is 6:02 and we are already -6 amp/hours. The reality is that we are getting less that eight hours of solar harvest strong enough to charge our batteries…the joys of winter. But the nights have been warm enough that I have shut the boiler off. The scaling between the days is different because we needed to nuke the butter for our toast which because of the draw changed the amperage scale, and at 10 o’clock on the second snapshot we were bringing in 16 amps as compared to the 7 amps, the difference because of the new panels…just saying