Going off grid

[Watercourse management]

As per title, with our electricity prices jumping from 15 p per kWh to 27 kWh and not looking like it’s ever going to get a lot cheaper is it time to consider going off grid. 

I have been looking at systems which combine battery solar and wind backed up with a diesel generator to charge the batteries ( lead acid ) when they are discharged to 50 percent, also the genni would be 3 phase to run the workshop instead of using single phase inverters.

anyone have any experience of these systems?

 

[john paget]

Don’t! We are currently off grid, 1000ah of batteries, 2xinverters, loads of panels, 3x generators, untold ****************ing about in the dark and rain when a generator has a wobble. Can’t wait for our mains connection to arrive..(16 months and counting). The amount of labour involved soon counteracts any actual kWh cost

[scraggs]

I am currently doing exactly that.
Apart from electricity madly going up. the plans of Boris to do away with petrol and diesel cars and replace them with electric that we don't have the infrastructure to supply I see huge problems in the pipeline so thought it would be a wise time to set it all up.

We will be having 14kw of panels, connected to an AC inverter that will supply during the day and charge a 48v 930 amp wet cell battery bank, then at night a Victron 8kva inverter will supply our needs, that is all backed up with a 13kva single phase genny which should only need to fire up every few days during December, January and February.
Only issue I could see with your setup as it's what I originally planned would be switching from 3 phase to single, I was going to do that but it meant either a setup even more complex than it already is, or working out some way of auto switching the genny from single to 3 phase, or doing it manually, also several generator manufacturers weren't interested in supplying a single/3 phase generator as the change over switches can be unreliable apparently.
I settled keeping it single phase but will end up with a lot of kva with the inverter and genny able to supply together.
I hope I have got everything in our setup right

[scraggs]

33 minutes ago, john paget said:

Don’t! We are currently off grid, 1000ah of batteries, 2xinverters, loads of panels, 3x generators, untold ****************ing about in the dark and rain when a generator has a wobble. Can’t wait for our mains connection to arrive..(16 months and counting). The amount of labour involved soon counteracts any actual kWh cost

interested to know why you have had so many problems, do you have to rely on the gennies for when it's dark ?

[Macpherson]

25 minutes ago, scraggs said:

I am currently doing exactly that.
Apart from electricity madly going up. the plans of Boris to do away with petrol and diesel cars and replace them with electric that we don't have the infrastructure to supply I see huge problems in the pipeline so thought it would be a wise time to set it all up.

We will be having 14kw of panels, connected to an AC inverter that will supply during the day and charge a 48v 930 amp wet cell battery bank, then at night a Victron 8kva inverter will supply our needs, that is all backed up with a 13kva single phase genny which should only need to fire up every few days during December, January and February.
Only issue I could see with your setup as it's what I originally planned would be switching from 3 phase to single, I was going to do that but it meant either a setup even more complex than it already is, or working out some way of auto switching the genny from single to 3 phase, or doing it manually, also several generator manufacturers weren't interested in supplying a single/3 phase generator as the change over switches can be unreliable apparently.
I settled keeping it single phase but will end up with a lot of kva with the inverter and genny able to supply together.
I hope I have got everything in our setup right

 

Yep, super interested in this topic.. I considered PV before just  the feed in tariff was removed, iirc it was 43 p per unit but just missed out,  now I'm not really interested in what I can earn but far more just about having volts whatever happens in the future.

 

So with that in mind I'm thinking of accessible ground mounted PV and batteries with the possible addition of wind and genny

 

Also thinking about bio-digester to be independent when it comes to gas cooking... after all every morning I produce the feed for such a system which at the moment is being wasted 🙄

 

Even if reliable illumination is all that's able to be achieved particularly with LED's which draw very little, this in itself would be valuable, I look forward to learning from the input of others which is essentially the power of this forum and the reason I joined in the first place. cheers.

 

It's funny that I've though about this all my life and now that it's a practical reality there may be no time left...

[MattyF]

We need to upgrade our pv's as they are 20 years old but run a largish turbine and geny to a victron inverter and battery bank , I guess the genny is going off every two days if there is no wind , it can be a week in summer.. I'm not overly happy with our set up as the genny should kick in if the battery gets below 50% but it usually plunges us in to darkness at around 65% , my phone is sporadic in when it wants to connect to victron and gives false readings like yesterday it was saying it was 61% and would not let me connect to the board to turn it on remotely so got in to a panic about getting back and the genny on but when I did it was reading 81% ! Luckily there is some one here all the time so it's if no real concern but I would love to find some one to set it up properly ... and install more PV's as our engineer is useless at best.

Bill Peirce on here has a good set up and it didn't cost him the earth , also he can use an electric kettle and dishwasher which is like black magic too me !

[trigger_andy]

14 minutes ago, MattyF said:

We need to upgrade our pv's as they are 20 years old but run a largish turbine and geny to a victron inverter and battery bank , I guess the genny is going off every two days if there is no wind , it can be a week in summer.. I'm not overly happy with our set up as the genny should kick in if the battery gets below 50% but it usually plunges us in to darkness at around 65% , my phone is sporadic in when it wants to connect to victron and gives false readings like yesterday it was saying it was 61% and would not let me connect to the board to turn it on remotely so got in to a panic about getting back and the genny on but when I did it was reading 81% ! Luckily there is some one here all the time so it's if no real concern but I would love to find some one to set it up properly ... and install more PV's as our engineer is useless at best.

Bill Peirce on here has a good set up and it didn't cost him the earth , also he can use an electric kettle and dishwasher which is like black magic too me !

That just sounds like far more hassle than its even remotely worth. 

[scraggs]

I will not be feeding back to the grid it's now 11p kwh and not worth it, plus finding a sparks who properly understands setting up the charger/inverter around here is proving to be a major task so I'm doing the Victron online courses to do it myself. as we progress we will be using a water heating system as a way of storing excess generated power, it works by pushing any excess from 100watts/h  to 6kwh to a couple of immersion heaters.
One thing you need to do is look very carefully at your electric usage, you cant expect to supply the same as you currently use, things like cooking in a different way, my wife has been excellent in looking at ways to save energy there, pressure cooking saves a fair amount of power, our dehumidifiers which we really didn't want to not use have been swapped for high energy efficiency ones that use a quarter of the power.
I have now fitted most of the DC inverter side up.
It's been a very interesting project so far. and at current electricity usage rates and cost per kwh and system cost it's about an 8 year payback, and virtually every major component in the system has a 25 year warranty.
Another reason we went for it is I have a solar system on my boat and since fitting it we have never needed shore power, and it was that  that got me really interested in it.

[scraggs]

28 minutes ago, MattyF said:

We need to upgrade our pv's as they are 20 years old but run a largish turbine and geny to a victron inverter and battery bank , I guess the genny is going off every two days if there is no wind , it can be a week in summer.. I'm not overly happy with our set up as the genny should kick in if the battery gets below 50% but it usually plunges us in to darkness at around 65% , my phone is sporadic in when it wants to connect to victron and gives false readings like yesterday it was saying it was 61% and would not let me connect to the board to turn it on remotely so got in to a panic about getting back and the genny on but when I did it was reading 81% ! Luckily there is some one here all the time so it's if no real concern but I would love to find some one to set it up properly ... and install more PV's as our engineer is useless at best.

Bill Peirce on here has a good set up and it didn't cost him the earth , also he can use an electric kettle and dishwasher which is like black magic too me !

I wish we could use a turbine here, but since they decided to build houses all around use it wouldn't be practical

Edited December 11, 2021 by scraggs

[scraggs]

7 minutes ago, trigger_andy said:

That just sounds like far more hassle than its even remotely worth. 

An off grid setup if set up properly should only need the batteries topping up monthly and a quick check over everything, everything else should be automatically done, and that with auto top up is a 5 minute job.
Probably like a lot of things the technology has advanced and newer kit is capable of doing most of it.