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Nerdishness and Solar power

Pfitzy

George Gregan (70)
From someone I know who looked into it:

"It appears that this is a very good scam. If you go to https://www.lgenergy.com.au/ there's a message on the main page stating that LG has no affiliation or association with LG Energy Solutions. I spoke to LG Energy last night and was told that they were investigating legal options. I found a forum at https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/299332?page=1#comment that seems to confirm my suspicions. Fortunately, I haven't given them any money...seems the deal WAS too good to be true!!"
 

Lindommer

Steve Williams (59)
Staff member
The real LG wouldn't be too happy about LGES's use of their logo. I'd imagine many would take that as a genuine LG offer.
 

ChargerWA

Mark Loane (55)
It's such a fucking shame that the Solar industry, like nearly any industry which has a growth phase at the hands of a government subsidy attracts all of the wrong sorts.

I know these were scammers, but half of the "legitimate" installer companies out there aren't much better.
 

Pfitzy

George Gregan (70)
Its a very interesting move for the American market. They have a LOT of re-roofing over there, though I question the validity of installing one if you live in Tornado Alley ;)

Here? Not sure there is quite the demand for it. There will be people who think solar panels are ugly I suppose and want something a bit more low profile. Add in the fact that they're much better insulators than standard concrete roof tiles, and its heading in the right direction.

BUT I still have questions over how the wiring standards hold up, particularly with metallic sarking and steel framed houses.
 

ChargerWA

Mark Loane (55)
Looking at the tile it has two connector pins on the top which must clip into a DC Bus. The cost here is going to be micro inverters. If you're not across the efficiencies of solar panels, basically if you have multiple solar cells linked together and one fails, it drags the performance of the rest in the group down to the performance of the bad one. With so many potentials for failure with so many tiles you will need a lot of micro inverters instead of one big inverter, to insure yourself against a cell failure.

But either way, this is the future.

The more I think about Musk the more I think he is a modern day Gailileo or DaVinci. Feels like the dude might single handedly save the planet.
 

Pfitzy

George Gregan (70)
This bloke is trying to out-Pfitzy Pfitzy.


Can't be done. I'll just up the fuckery count.

I've put my concerns about wiring specs above, and with the patent SolarCity lodged now released to Tesla Energy, some clever cookie has dug it up:

https://electrek.co/2017/08/30/tesla-solar-roof-tile-system-explained-patent/amp/

Conductive adhesive to join multiple tiles together. To Charger's point:

With so many potentials for failure with so many tiles you will need a lot of micro inverters instead of one big inverter, to insure yourself against a cell failure.


Not necessarily - if you join a set of tiles together into (say) 250-300W arrays, like existing solar panels, you can use a micro-inverter or power optimiser for that array only.

So it becomes similar to the panels I have, with the SolarEdge Optimisers on each panel. One panel dies or gets a bit of shade, the others keep humming.

The solar tiles aren't designed to be every part of the roof - they're meant to integrate with existing tiles or shingles as well even though the cost of the solar tiles is supposed to be cheaper over the lifetime.

Not sure I'd want my entire roof stuck together with conductive adhesive.
 

boyo

Mark Ella (57)
I have now two strings (?) of PV panels and a battery. I will be interested to see how it all goes.
 

Pfitzy

George Gregan (70)
OH shit that's me!

Still kicking along. I shut down my blog as I didn't have time or ideas to contribute to it. Was a fun couple of years.

Anyway, the most interesting part of the Powerwall right now is I've noted a slight degree of degradation at this point. Keep in mind the original usable capacity was 6.0kWh out of the 6.4kWh rated capacity - there is a good reason for this as lithium storage doesn't really like going above or below the 10% margin at each end.

The original warranty looked like this:

tesla_powerwall_original_warranty.jpg


I got mine installed end of January 2016, so we're now past the 2 years mentioned in the image above.

Also worth noting they changed the warranty to "unlimited use" in 2016 but were a bit cagey about the degradation aspect.

In any case, I should be able to use 85% of the 6.4kWh capacity, or 5.44kWh

At present I'm still capturing about 5.5-5.8kWh per day by the look of it, so am ahead of the warranted capacity on the figures I'm able to obtain.

It is hard to get a clean figure of capacity, however, because sometimes the battery still has charge in it at the start of the day, so "Energy Captured" is a bit misleading.

What I can say is that, after the first 12 months of watching every electron like a madman, I've relaxed a fair bit. Even then, I'm still saving around $2k per annum through a mixture of solar, storage, and using the data to figure out when/how to run things.

8 year payback is on track. If I had a Powerwall 2 it would be shorter.
 
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