Power Rack - Net Metering vs Rental Solar

Originally I thought it might be a good idea to have solar as a means to combat prohibitively high power rates, however without local storage usage vs pushing back to the grid means its difficult tocapitalize on this without specific usage patterns.

Enter 22 KWH of lithium ion batteries in a server rack, the beginning of not pushing excess energy back to the grid.

Over the coming weeks I will update this thread on hardware, software, data and images of the progress.

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Here is a typical example of current power production


There is another bank of panels waiting for a MidNite Classic 200 to start charging things in addition to regular production.

I plan to add graphs for the MidNite Classic, Charging and Grid Tie Inverter discharging.

Welcome to the club!

Welcome,

What type of cells r u building.

Rahtid27 said:

Welcome,

What type of cells r u building.

Click to expand...

The LG Chem 2.5kwh 60v modules x9 to start with.

If things work out well perhaps 18 of them

I got a MidNite Classic 200 and hooked it up to start getting all my batteries to the same state of charge, it was pretty easy to integrate with the MidNite and collect data.

Here is a graph showing a few things

1st : At ~9:45 I moved something that was shading the charging solar array
2nd : At ~12:05 The first battery hit its charge limit and went into absorb mode
3rd : At ~12:55 I hooked up a second battery to start it charging





No discharge graph, however I was able to discharge 2KWH out of this battery in a 2hr test pulling each cell down to about 3.4

Once I get all 9 batteries hooked up and charged I'll make some pictures and or a video with some numbers.

Have been looking at those batteries... Seems like an Awesome built!

How many server tower would you need for the 18?

Good luck, keep us posted!

Nice setup and those packs are awesome

Running first shakedown discharge @ 200w

Just making sure there are no errors, still need to clean up some wiring and stuff

Loads and generators are fused w/ 30a fuse on positive and negative side
Rail V is 50-64
Solar is just 4x 315w panels, have 12 more to add in with more midnite classics later
Inverter is just 1000w grid tie, going to add 2 more 2000w later

Wow! nice! looks great! Umm, but, you said you need to clean up some wiring. Where?!?! It's super clean from my perspective. Unless you mean hidden wires that we can't see in the pics.

I'll post more pics later after cleanup.

However the next steps are the most important.

Someone building a super basic charge/discharge buffer like this can do it very easy, now the hard part is knowing how much to discharge and when.

In places where people own their home and/or have access to put a CT clamp around the utility feed this problem is very easy to solve, and the goal is to invert power back out any time your withdrawing power from the grid.

I cannot do this, so the plan is to build a bunch of Zigbee Kill-a-Watt meters and data log all of them, and invert power to meet the sum of those meters.

All of these will feed back into the database that logs all my solar enphase and solar midnite data, all the software part is pretty easy for me and I think building the ZigBee meters will be easy also.

When I get consumption charts up I will control the inverters and attempt to make them equal to the sum of all loads.

Real time graphs and more pictures incoming once I get some more stuff ordered.

And a link to my real time charging graph, which shows the charge from a MidNite Classic 200 and 4x300w panels

http://solar.iceisfun.com/PowerWallCharge

Tomorrow will be the first day where it is charging a whole bank instead of just topping off single batteries to prepare them for connecting to the fuse bus bar.

Fuse Issues were stopping a MidNite Classic from getting into Bulk

The fuse was a 30A ANL fuse on the positive and negative battery terminal, when I connected the wires right up to the bus bar it took off in Bulk right away.

When it was showing float there was an oscillation between 7:30 and 8:00

shown in the picture attached.

Do I just need bigger fuses?