Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I edited my comment and added a screenshot from my grafana dashboard to show the trend over the year and some other numbers. Batteries are expensive but they are worth imo. ~75% of the electricity usage of this house with 6 people comes from its own solar production. There is however a cut off for how much battery capacity makes sense. To get the last 20% of self sufficiency you would need a disproportionally larger battery to make up for long periods of low sun. so 80% is as good as its gonna get while staying cost effective.
I did a calculation for a 20kWh battery for my installation, which would cost me about 18k to purchase and setup. I can do a lot of the work myself, so the equipment costs are the bulk of the price. Figuring a prediction in the price of energy, my usage pattern and a lifetime of 15 years for the batteries, it figured out to be not worth it.
In winter where I live I'm totally fucked, there is basically no sun at all and it's cold AF so energy usage is highest. Any battery would be empty within days and not really able to charge it because the little bit of solar that might be available is used right away in heating. So it would be down to spring and fall where there is still some sun and also some request for energy.
For a house of 6 people we installed 5kWh which is basically perfect for them, but they are also very resourceful with their electricity usage, running washing, cleaning and cooking during the day as to not drain the battery at night.
But yeah if you dont get enough sun in your area its just a waste of money. My parents system will be payed off after 11 years if the sun stays at the level it has been at for the past 2 years.
Predicting how import vs export costs might develop is also a big factor