I’m trying and doing experiments. I have a cabin off grid on their land and it’s mostly solar, but I do need to burn wood during winter even if I don’t really like it. He has a sugar shack on another corner of the land and he’s also using solar, except the stoves and boiler. I bought him an inverter and he prefers this to the noisy generator.
However he pretty much hates everything else with batteries. My mother has an electric golf cart and he whines every time the lead acid batteries need maintenance or need to be changed (because of lack of maintenance). I could swap them for lifepo4 batteries, but they’re still going to lose capacity over time and we’re getting to the same point of “but I don’t have to put a $1000 worth of batteries in my tractor every few years”! Same “issue” with an electric ATV for the kids. He hates it because it needs to be charged and the lifepo4 battery had to be changed once. But apparently the cost of gas and diesel doesn’t register.
But yeah. So far at the latitude we’re at, solar power input and consumption varies a lot depending on the seasons. The solar setup is fine for the sugar shack because it’s used during the day in the spring, when there’s no leaves. But in the cabin, it’s been more complicated. I’m not there year-round and it works well in summer, but in winter the lifepo4 batteries need to be heated for hours if not days before I can charge them via solar, and get acceptable performance. It’s a work in progress.
I can highly recommend These batteries for home level power i have 6 of them and they make my offgrid life possible. Rated for 6000 deep discharges (or 16 years of literally daily deep discharge) they have a standard charge range of 5°C to 70°C naturally if you are in a cold latitude an even mildly insulted shed would be ideal to justify stay above that 5c mark.
If your sun is limited especially in winter consider giving east/west vertical panel orientation a shot. And that same site with the batteries has great deals on palettes of solar panels if you just need more in general.
If you aren’t already using 48V for inverters make the switch, much more efficient and long term cheaper. Put your panels into as large of a series string as your inverter will allow before parallel. Higher voltage incurs less resistance losses and it can be a pretty significant loss. Had an inverter die on me and had to drop to an older inverter while waiting for the replacement. It didn’t support the higher voltage as the newer one so had to drop from 320v to 80v ( from one string of 8 to pairs of 2 in parallel) ended up losing almost a full 1kW of peak potential
Thanks for the tips. I’m kind of stuck with the choices I’ve made in the past and I don’t want to upgrade or change before it’s really needed, in order to prevent waste. One is just a cabin where I go maybe a dozen times a year. The other is a sugar shack used in the day for only a few weeks during the spring so it just has a 3000W 24V inverter. It’s enough for the lights and the water pump once in a while. We really don’t need that much power for now but I’ll certainly switch to 48v when we’ll need to upgrade.
As for the ideal temperature, I’ve pretty much given up. The average temps in January are around -10°C and it sometimes goes in the -20°C. I thought about multiple ways to insulate and heat the batteries but in the end, I don’t want to leave this unattended in the middle of a forest. So far my solution in winter for the cabin is to carry a portable power station that was sitting in a heated place.
Lifepo4 is pretty much the one type you can safely leave unattended, it’s very very hard to get them to burn and even when they do it’s mostly smoke. Lithium is the big flame/boom one. The trade off is less energy density compared with lithium but for home storage thats less of an issue. The batteries i shared even feature fire suppression systems (basically an automatically deployed fire ratardant foam internally) for additional protection.
Building a little box of insulation around the batteries using some foam board panels and a water heater blanket with some water pipe heating tape you can get at most hardware stores would be the cheap easy way and should help with the colder month temps. And is easily picked uo and set aside in warmer weather
I’m trying and doing experiments. I have a cabin off grid on their land and it’s mostly solar, but I do need to burn wood during winter even if I don’t really like it. He has a sugar shack on another corner of the land and he’s also using solar, except the stoves and boiler. I bought him an inverter and he prefers this to the noisy generator.
However he pretty much hates everything else with batteries. My mother has an electric golf cart and he whines every time the lead acid batteries need maintenance or need to be changed (because of lack of maintenance). I could swap them for lifepo4 batteries, but they’re still going to lose capacity over time and we’re getting to the same point of “but I don’t have to put a $1000 worth of batteries in my tractor every few years”! Same “issue” with an electric ATV for the kids. He hates it because it needs to be charged and the lifepo4 battery had to be changed once. But apparently the cost of gas and diesel doesn’t register.
But yeah. So far at the latitude we’re at, solar power input and consumption varies a lot depending on the seasons. The solar setup is fine for the sugar shack because it’s used during the day in the spring, when there’s no leaves. But in the cabin, it’s been more complicated. I’m not there year-round and it works well in summer, but in winter the lifepo4 batteries need to be heated for hours if not days before I can charge them via solar, and get acceptable performance. It’s a work in progress.
I can highly recommend These batteries for home level power i have 6 of them and they make my offgrid life possible. Rated for 6000 deep discharges (or 16 years of literally daily deep discharge) they have a standard charge range of 5°C to 70°C naturally if you are in a cold latitude an even mildly insulted shed would be ideal to justify stay above that 5c mark.
If your sun is limited especially in winter consider giving east/west vertical panel orientation a shot. And that same site with the batteries has great deals on palettes of solar panels if you just need more in general.
If you aren’t already using 48V for inverters make the switch, much more efficient and long term cheaper. Put your panels into as large of a series string as your inverter will allow before parallel. Higher voltage incurs less resistance losses and it can be a pretty significant loss. Had an inverter die on me and had to drop to an older inverter while waiting for the replacement. It didn’t support the higher voltage as the newer one so had to drop from 320v to 80v ( from one string of 8 to pairs of 2 in parallel) ended up losing almost a full 1kW of peak potential
Thanks for the tips. I’m kind of stuck with the choices I’ve made in the past and I don’t want to upgrade or change before it’s really needed, in order to prevent waste. One is just a cabin where I go maybe a dozen times a year. The other is a sugar shack used in the day for only a few weeks during the spring so it just has a 3000W 24V inverter. It’s enough for the lights and the water pump once in a while. We really don’t need that much power for now but I’ll certainly switch to 48v when we’ll need to upgrade.
As for the ideal temperature, I’ve pretty much given up. The average temps in January are around -10°C and it sometimes goes in the -20°C. I thought about multiple ways to insulate and heat the batteries but in the end, I don’t want to leave this unattended in the middle of a forest. So far my solution in winter for the cabin is to carry a portable power station that was sitting in a heated place.
Lifepo4 is pretty much the one type you can safely leave unattended, it’s very very hard to get them to burn and even when they do it’s mostly smoke. Lithium is the big flame/boom one. The trade off is less energy density compared with lithium but for home storage thats less of an issue. The batteries i shared even feature fire suppression systems (basically an automatically deployed fire ratardant foam internally) for additional protection.
Building a little box of insulation around the batteries using some foam board panels and a water heater blanket with some water pipe heating tape you can get at most hardware stores would be the cheap easy way and should help with the colder month temps. And is easily picked uo and set aside in warmer weather