Has anyone here gone full solar?

[SHOZ]

Originally Posted By: alarmguy
Originally Posted By: SHOZ
There is always some electrical load the solar panels can feed when disconnected from the grid.


It wont power your house, we maybe talking about one circuit and an outlet?
Far cry to people, including me, thinking during a black out life goes on as normal for the 15,000 dollar plus panels we bought. )
Depends on your nominal electrical load. As someone else stated if you want to go completely off grid many things should be considered. First and foremost would be to use the most efficient items as far as electrical use.

My monthly use is around 500 kwh and my peak kwh use was 3.4 last month.

And yes you could set up your load so it mainly is on one circuit. My daytime load is like this as the one circuit that feeds the computers and TV are all on on circuit. My peak load would come from the electric oven or AC in summer. Neither would I expect to fully power from a 2kwh solar panel.

 

[MolaKule]

Originally Posted By: UberArchetype
Adequately sizing the system is important. I suspect most solar contractors and companies assume an optimistic weather profile in their calculations. We installed a max-allowable system here 3 years ago, with satisfactory results, so far. The first year was great, and there was only one month our previously banked kilowatts did not cover, resulting in a small shortfall. IOW, I was only out of pocket for about $50 worth of electricity for the entire year. But the weather was pretty great here all that year, too. Last year was on average, about 20% cloudier overall and it directly translated to electric bills in Jan, Feb and March (the short daylight months).

PA is going be a hit on the weather factor. Go big or stay home.



Proper sizing is a must for sure.

And for a complete, integrated system you would need a hefty (> 10 kW) and expensive pure sine-wave inverter, since most appliances do not digest Modified-sine wave waveforms without problems. A pure sine-wave wave inverter requires feeding it with large high current batteries as well.

I helped a guy in Kansas build a solar system for his airplane hanger and runway lights. It was not a cheap endeavor.

 

[UberArchetype]

Originally Posted By: alarmguy
Net result in an ideal world is zero cost for electricity from your power company and also possible that you might actually get paid for your electric because you produced more...

I don't see this happening in any way favorable to consumers due to monetizing issues. The local governments/utilities will set wholesale vs. consumer rates to re-sell solar-produced customer's power for a profit. It's almost like a reverse subsidy. Our local setup here in CO is such that no money transaction is involved. Excess production metered back into the grid is banked on a kWHr basis, per customer account. Whatever electricity the customer is currently producing or generated in the past is always available for their use.

We installed a good-sized system (8.82Kw) for a typical single-family home and it would probably cover 100% of our usage if I wasn't such a power hog.