The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Renewables => Topic started by: cloddopper on September 19, 2016, 12:44:50 am
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Just over five years ago we had the home modernised and had solar PV panels fitted three years ago .
At the time it was illegal to store PV generated power if you were connected to the mains electricity and you certainly could not get FIT payments for it even if you were off grid .
Tonight I've been shown via " yougen.co.uk " that there are now fridge sized systems that can be fitted as a new install or retrofitted that are legal in the UK , that will allow you to store PV produced electricity for the purposes of running almost all the lighter current consumption devices in your home.
They don't have much capacity but can run most of the low current devices such as computers , modem ( it's a failrly high consumption ) , TV & back up etc .
Over a year all these little bits of power cost the average family getting on for £ 200 plus vat .
There is also a new power source coming on stream that uses Bauxite as the main component ( Magnesium & Calcium ) for the power storage .
Once the engineers solve the heat generation problem we may well be into seeing a tremendous amount of domestic production and a big rethink on the national power stations.
Have any of you got a fridge sized power store yet ?
Are any of you interested in such a development or got any views upon it all ?
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Funnily enough, the community where I'm going is wanting to put in batteries to make better use of the solar power and ground source heat pump systems they already have. But whether these are the same things you're meaning, I'm not sure.
You can see more on the project bid for the M&S Energy fund linky (https://www.mandsenergyfund.com/projects/sunshine-batteries-for-trelay). Needless to say, please feel free to vote for the project! :eyelashes:
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Watching with interest
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Interesting - is it going to be able to be moved around if you move house for example.
What happened to the tesla domestic battery that was in the news a few months ago - that was aiming to solve the problem in a similar way by the sound of it.
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I suspect that the devices running off the battery fridge would be better off on a dedicated circuit so you cannot accidentally pug in an electric kettle or other heavy current device and drain the fridge in seconds .
I've run in a dedicated unconnected to house mains supply ring main & spur arrangement to run off our 220 volt pure sine wave suitcase genny set ......... It's for emergency stuff like central heating , Alison's business computer , the TV & some house lights should we get a prolonged power disruption .
I reckon a big independent mains charged up storage device out at the back of the garage in a dedicated shed would work well connected up to the red emergency sockets .
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Another renewable heat source is barrels of " Glaubers salts " . set in an insulated concrete cellar type housing . They can be heated up via an exchanger or an immersum type heater to get the salts liquid . The heat can then be taken back out to run hot water , underfloor heating etc. It can also be the heat source for heat pumps .
Another thing I was going to do was sink 60 or so 2 foot dia concrete pipes in a letter " U " about six feet below the ground . filling them as they are placed with stacked up common house bricks that have holes in them.
So that when I drag hot air out of a dedicated polytunnel through the " U " via a solar powered PV fan it heats up the bricks to quite a high temp .
The concrete pipes would have been set on a small plinth & industrially sprayed in six inches of high U value thermal foam before being back filled over . ( approx £ 800 at the time in 1994 ) Any day light would give some heat into the thermal store , it was going to be drawn off via a PV charged battery system to get warmth out of it & into my house during the evenings ·
Unfortunately on 4 th Sept 1995 I got crippled at my paid day job before I could get it installed & running .
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Several of these storage systems are now coming to the market and often sold on the back of a PV installation. i have yet to see one which comes anywhere near giving a decent payback. i think they have a lot of work to do to get the price down to a level where they will add anything to the renewable equation rather than the salesman bank balance.
Still it is an interesting subject and hopefully an economic solution will be found. At the moment an average 4 kw pv system will generate about 3700kwh per year and about 2000kwh will go to the grid this can be converted to heat in the hot water tank if the element is in the bottom and the tank large enough for a DIY cost of around £300 giving a payback in about 2 years. Systems storing domestic electricity for reuse still have paybacks running to 15 years and beyond without including the cost of replacement batteries.
Regen