Friday, December 2, 2011

Resistance is Futile! Our Inverter has been re-assimilated!

Renewable energy system update!  The new monitoring system is up and running.  We can control whether the inverter is on or off.  At present, we can turn the inverter off on demand and it will automatically turn the power back on when the battery bank is nearly depleted.  We now need to look into extending this time period by using a separate battery bank and small inverter.  Being able to control the inverter electronically is a big step forward.

The next piece is adding more logic to the system.  A piece of critical logic is to have the system turn the inverter back on when it detects that the temperature of the house reaches a critical level.  The (below) graphic shows a green line that is closer to ZERO amps.  Instead of burning 4 to 6 amps continuously, we can make the system idle so it is only using 0.3 to 0.5 amps.

Using the ability to turn the system off, it looks like we can go to running the generator every third day instead of every second day.  Say, we need to run the generator from Oct to Feb (appox. 151 days).  Every 2nd day would be 75 generator runs times 10 run hours or 750 engine hours.  Every third day is 50 generator runs or 500 engine hours.  Good deal!

Here is a curious device for those with wood stoves and are off grid.  How about powering some lights from your wood stove?  Up to 13.9V at 30 Watts?  I've not tested this yet, but here is a link:
http://www.tegpower.com/pro1.htm.