Renewable Revolution

Quote from: David B. on March 14, 2018, 11:35:08 pm

Well, Anchorage averages 1.5 hours of usable sun in the winter. Our problem is you get 2, 3, 4, 10 days of very little sun then 5 hours on one day. You try to size battery banks to store 2 days of usage while not destroying them. You can add extra generator time or oversizing arrays but that is the general rule. So for you: say you could make that 3kW per day we would want to store 6kW Hr while not discharging a lead acid bank more then 60-70 percent at most. For you 4 L16 6 volt 400 amp hour batteries with a 2.4 kW array. About $1600 for the battery bank good for 5-10 years depending on how you abuse it.

$1600 is more in budget, but really I don't need that much.  Beside SUN (or lack therof) we get a lot of WIND here in the valley, it comes whistling down off the mountains at least 1/2 the days where I live in the Winter.  Then in summer of course you get much more sun for much longer periods of time.  If I was really trying to go off grid and not just stay prepped for temporary outages, I think I could get away with 2kwh of storage.  I would trim my usage considerably also on days my system wasn't generating power as well.

RE