What to do with excess energy?

Depends on what you have available. For me its heating our hot-water.

I do it like this:

 
daromer said:
Depends on what you have available. For me its heating our hot-water.
Click to expand...

How do you heat hot water?
Isn't it hot already?
:p

Wolf
 
It can always become warmer ;) Hot water doesnt tell what temperature it is at but my solar heats it up more.
 
If you have chalk or limestone available, build a small electric furnace and create quicklime / cement... enclose / insulate the furnace and you can make it more energy efficient than a commercial gas kiln because of the elimination of flue gas airflow. You can also make it small or large... Slowly build a concrete shed in the garden... that's my plan (large shed!).

Recycle aluminium by smelting it into useable billets (blocks that can be used on a CNC machine) ...

If you have a source of very old copper electro purify the copper and strip out all the other valuable metals which increasing the purity of the base copper.. copper ore has 2-40g gold per tone but they electro refine and strip it out. Old copper can have 50-80g gold per ton. Just need a tub of copper sulphate to get going.
https://www.boliden.com/globalasset...stream-ulf-soderstrom-president-ba-market.pdf

Buy the other half a slow cooker if it is not a politically incorrect sexist gift.... they use a bit of power and tastes quite nice in the end...

Leave your computer on and mine bitcoin...

Etc...
 
Sean not necesary... Its just a matter of balancing Winter vs Summer here... I make 100kwh per Day during Summer.... And during Winter only 5. I use 20 per Day... No a larger battery wont balance it.
 
I'm in the same boat with summer approaching. There's always going to be more sun during the summer than winter and I will always have plenty of excess solar output. My water heater is natural gas, so during the winter it's 100% on gas. For the summer my plan is to install a pre-heater that's electric and set the temperature point at higher than the gas fired. I've already obtained a point of use 12 gallon heater that runs on 120V. That makes it easier to wire to my existing outlet, and will take about 800W, which leaves lots of room left for my 2.4kw inverter. The plumbing I'm hoping to be easy disconnect ('hoping' because its' quite rusty and I haven't changed the anode rod since purchase) and I have 24 inch flexible hoses to connect it. So it's either a 10 minute job... or... a nightmare... :angel:
 
Sean what??
 
Energy consumption also varies, no matter how large a battery is: it wont charge any more when full. I find the sizing of these systems quite challenging.
 
Now I understand why Monty Python did not travel well... lol
 
This is a small test setup that I tried out....


image_mgqgmu.jpg


Could not get the aluminium to melt because I had the nicrome wire current too high so when it all warmed up the nicrome melted before it melted the aluminium.

The load was around 10-15A per wire.

I have a more wire on order and will have a 6kWfunace hopefully running soon, all on battery power from excess solar.
 
Why don't you make a heated seat with a old hairdryer? Nice purpose for excess energy!

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrnCDKB1hE0[/video]
 
In my case, I designed my off-grid system to be a little less that my home can consume. Right now/summer (45Kwh/day) the Inverter runs from 10:00AM to 3:00AM (17hrs out of 24). As I build out more panels, my plan is to power the overall house heat-pump/air-conditioner - but still, will have less than house can consume in 24hr period. My concept is to get closer and closer to what the house consumes - for example, just put in hybrid electric hot water tank (150kwh/month) and the spa is always waiting - but not go past that. Then, in a true disaster situation, simply turn off spa but have plenty of power for heat and maybe even air-conditioning during 1/2 the day :)
 
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