NOMADICISTA

It was a dark and stormy night... (sounds like a book :) ) Actually, it was and the day wasn't much better. So, it was indoor tinkering today. The Yuasa charger is not quite ideal for gel batteries as the Yuasa SLA batteries are a type of AGM battery. So they set the voltage a little high at 29.0V f...

Been busy at work lately so not had much time for updates. The first of the bad gales swept through here this week but the big panels are still on the garage roof (through the magic of ratchet tie-downs :wink: ). The ones on the wall are quite handy for keeping the driving rain off the woodwork of t...

Hi Sharky!

There's a great photo story here of an old water mill being resurrected as first an industrial air compressor and now a grid tied generator.

http://s990.photobucket.com/albums/af26 ... aterwheel/

Hey, thanks Sharkey. I looked at variacs but couldn't find any high power ones that would do the 6A for the water heater. I've got a little one that I used for controlling a mains fan and varying the power of a soldering iron. The tool transformer was cheaper than building anything else and I'm not ...

A few weeks go I was pondering whether to stick with off-grid or go for a grid-tie inverter. Small ones like the Mastervolt Soladin 600 are quite cheap now (about £450) and can work at lowish voltages (unlike the normal grid tie stuff that works at 400-600V). But it only puts out 600W. Then I disco...

Thanks Griff, I'm glad people are getting something out of this. I now cross post to a UK forum where there's lots of home-made bodgery going on. http://www.navitron.org.uk/forum/index.php I masquerade as "Outtasight" over there (on account of having changed my car to a Honda Insight). Thi...

Difficult Loads Part II - The Water Heater So next there's the water heater problem... Uses about 4kWh per day heating up a tank of water from 22'C to 60'C for our bath. The solar system makes lots of spare power in the afternoons but I've only got a 1kW inverter and besides, the array only makes a...

It's been a while since my last post. But don't let that fool you... There's been plenty of bodging and experimenting going on here :D I've been pondering what to do with the excess power that my solar arrays make on very sunny days. It gets to about lunchtime and the battery bank is about 75% full ...

Nice woodwork. How is it pumped or does it just work off the mains pressure coming in at the bottom of the tank to push the hot water up out the top? How do you stop it from getting too hot?

Some more detail on the plumbing & controls would be interesting.

Nice one. With those grounding clips... Don't you have to sand down the points at which they touch the frames? The Sharp panels I have have a clear coat on the aluminium which means you have to sand down the patch around the ground holes they provided or else the ground connection will be insulated!...

Bad luck Jerry, Like Sharkey said, it's very important that the bank is wired up so that equal current (charge and discharge) goes through each battery or else they'll get more and more out of balance over time. With two packs in parallel, it's easy enough to arrange as you just have to connect the ...

Did the pastor Christen the array with the traditional words... "May you always walk in the light"

A "Jacobs ladder" ray of light will beam out of the sky and they'll blow a fuse!

Nice pics Dennis. The block mount system looks interesting just using clamps to hold the panels. I suppose the panels are specially designed to fit the pitch of the roofing ridges? Out of interest, why didn't the owners want the panels visible from the ground? Most people here want to show them off....

Hahaha... gone a bit mad on eBay this month! I bought a second 80Wp Sharp from the same guy. He put it on eBay and this time I had less competition for it and secured the second one for just 205 Pounds. Now that I had another 160Wp set, I decided to put them both on the wall with the BP one. http://...

How do you lift them up? It was really hard to get my Sharp 170Wp pair up on the garage roof. You couldn't climb a ladder with one as it was too big and heavy to grip both sides or top and bottom (like the installation guide said) and if you tried to pick it up by the middle of just a top edge there...