If you have solar, is adding a simple, cheap timer to your electric hot water system worthwhile?
Lately my life has been a lollapalloza of solar electric hot water heating. I’ve looked at more ways of heating water using solar electricity than you can poke a stick at. Or at least I have if your poking arm is weak and flabby and easily fatigued. [Read more…]
The Sun Flux is a box of electronics with one function: heating water with solar electricity.
I recently wrote about solar hot water diverters1 which use surplus electricity from an existing rooftop solar system to heat water.
Another option for heating your water with solar electricity is to use dedicated solar panels. These panels put all their power directly into the hot water cylinder’s heating element. When the water hits its temperature set point the panels are deactivated. [Read more…]
If you want to store your solar energy, should you put it in a battery or in your hot water cylinder?
Update: Compare all the hot water diverters available in Australia here.
How A Diverter Can Give You Solar Hot Water And Store Energy At A Lower Cost Than Batteries
A solar hot water diverter is an electronic device that sends surplus electricity from your rooftop solar to your electric hot water cylinder. This reduces, or even eliminates, the need to use grid electricity to heat water. Under the right circumstances diverters can save you money and allow you to store energy at a cost lower than batteries.
We are getting reports of people paying through the nose for 5kW of “UV Solar Panels” from fast talking salespeople. Paying more for “UV Panels” is about as sensible as buying rainbow powered panels from a leprechaun.
The sun is a very large, naturally occurring, fusion reactor in the sky.
It constantly releases a vast amount of energy. Even by the standards of sky fusion reactors it’s pretty powerful and outshines at least 90% of the stars out there. [Read more…]
Note to installers: Don’t wire directly in to bathtub or the duck will die.
Over the past week or so I’ve been politely prodded by a plethora of people pushing me to provide information pertaining to solar hot water diverters.
A ‘hot water diverter’ is a box of power electronics that that sucks up your homes’ surplus solar electricity and diverts it to an electric hot water system instead of exporting it to the grid where it would earn a feed-in-tariff. If the whole system is well designed and installed it will greatly reduce or even eliminate using grid electricity for water heating. [Read more…]
STC prices dropping means solar prices have risen. What has that done to solar payback times?
We were warned.
We all knew this was coming.
But who among us was prepared for the recent tumble in the price of STCs that lower the cost of rooftop solar?
Well, I was. [Read more…]
A paper published in ‘Nature’ has agreed with Ronald’s back of an envelope conclusions from last year: at the moment, most grid connected storage harms the environment.
Almost a year ago I wrote an article about how on-grid home battery storage does not help the environment but instead harms it by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and other types of pollution. I am raising this topic again, hoisting it above my head, and waving it around, because a scientific paper published in the journal Nature vindicates my position. [Read more…]
Now you know what the those DNV-GL engineers *really* get up to in their secret European HQ…
DNV-GL’s PV Module Reliability Scorecard Report for 2017 is out1 and gives some fascinating results. You can follow that long link in the previous sentence to download your own copy of the report, but for your benefit, I’ve included my own unique analysis below, where I will give my interpretation of the results in 2,000 words or less.
Or possibly more. I’ve only just started writing so don’t really know just how many words I’ll require, but if it looks like I’ll go over my self-imposed limit I can just leaveoutsomespaces, so it’s not really a problem. [Read more…]
34 years after it was invented ‘PERC’ is now a big deal in solar panel technology. But what the hell is it?
Update 16th April 2019: Many PERC panels have suffered from LeTID deterioration problems since this article was written. This article here goes into the problem and this article on the MC Electrical blog covers it in detail and gives information on which PERC panels are resistant to LeTID.
Solar panel manufacturers crave efficiency. I’m not talking about the labour efficiencies they receive from building new production lines that are robot-heavy and people-light, although they like those too. [Read more…]
The STC price has plummeted and pushed the price of solar up. What should you do if you’ve already accepted a quote and the installer wants to increase the price?
I’m going to ask you to imagine preparing to buy a rooftop solar system. I want you to see yourself working hard, saving your money, doing your research, and getting yourself some quotes. After careful consideration, you decide upon an installer, sign the contract, and transfer a 10% deposit to them. At that point you would be looking forward to saving money on your electricity bills and doing your bit to help the environment.
Now imagine how you’d feel if, before the day of the installation, the installer contacts you and says the price has gone up and you now have to pay $1,000 extra.
I imagine you wouldn’t be very happy about it. [Read more…]
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