Almost a year has passed since my installation post . In early spring, a pandemic broke out and forced everyone to reconsider their views on their homes, the possibility of living in isolation from society, and their attitude to technology. For me, during this time, the baptism of fire of all equipment and my approach to the self-sufficiency of my home has passed. Today I want to talk about solar energy, self-sufficiency with all engineering systems, as well as normal and backup Internet access. For statistics and accumulated experience, under cat.
This is not a BP yet, but a test of nerves and an approach to organizing life. When I was building a house, I counted on the fact that for some time there might be no amenities familiar to a resident of any city: water, electricity, heat, communications. Therefore, my approach was based on redundancy of all critical systems:
Water: own well, but there is a well to draw water with a bucket if the pump fails or the power grid fails
Warm: Heat-intensive screed, which is heated by warm water floors and loses up to 3-4 degrees per day at -20 outside the window. That is, before freezing, in the absence of an external power supply, there are 2-3 days to put into operation a backup heating system (gas boiler powered by bottled gas).
Electricity: In addition to the standard connected 15 kW (3 phases), there is a private solar power plant with a capacity of 6 kW, an energy reserve in the battery of up to 6,5 kWh (70% of the battery discharge) and solar panels of 2,5 kW. Practice has shown that in the summer, due to work on the battery in the evening and at night and recharging from the sun during the day, you can live autonomously for almost unlimited time with some reservations, which I will discuss below. In addition, there is a backup generator, if the external network is absent for a long time and it is cloudy for several days, then it is enough to start the generator and recharge the battery.
Internet: Mobile router with a directional antenna and SIM cards of the two fastest mobile operators
I would like to dwell in more detail on solar energy and access to the network, since they are especially in demand and technologically advanced.
Solar power plant
Over the past time, I have been digging up information on the production of solar energy by month. The graphs clearly show how with the advent of autumn and a decrease in daylight hours, the total output decreases. In winter, there is practically no sun, or it is so low to the horizon that the crumbs of energy that can be collected using solar panels are only enough to keep electrical appliances running at a minimum.
I am often asked a question about heating with electricity generated from solar panels. Just look at the December output figures for the entire month and figure out how many hours of operation one electric heater will last this energy! Let me remind you that the average consumption of an oil cooler is 1,5 kW.
I also collected very interesting statistics on the consumption of electrical appliances in one cycle:
• Washing machine - 1,2 kWh
• Breadmaker - 0,7 kWh
• Dishwasher - 1 kWh
• Boiler 100l - 5,8 kWh
It is immediately clear that most of the energy is spent on heating water, and not on the operation of pumps or motors. Therefore, I abandoned the electric kettle and electric stove, which, although it boils water quite quickly, spends precious electricity on it, which may not be enough to run other vital systems. At the same time, my stove and oven are gas and will work even if all the electronics fail completely.
I will also give statistics on energy production by day for June 2020.
Taking into account the fact that in the Russian Federation it is not yet possible for private individuals to sell the generated renewable energy to the grid, it must be disposed of independently, otherwise it “disappears”. My on-grid inverter is set up in such a way that the solar power is used as a priority for the operation of household electrical appliances, and then the energy from the grid. But if a house consumes 300-500 watts, when the sky is clear and the sun is hot, then there are at least a few panels, but there is nowhere to put the energy. From here I deduced several rules that apply to all farms where there is a solar power plant:
• Washing machine, dishwasher, bread maker are turned on at near-peak and peak daily output to maximize the use of energy received from the sun.
• An electric boiler heats water from 23:7 to 11:18 at the night rate, and then from 18:23 to XNUMX:XNUMX when the sun is above the panels. At the same time, the water does not have time to cool completely, unless several people swim in a row in the interval from XNUMX to XNUMX hours. In this case, the boiler is turned on manually.
• I use electric lawn mowers and trimmers: firstly, electric motors are much easier to operate, do not require fuel and lubricants and such thorough maintenance as gasoline ones. Second, they are quieter. Thirdly, the cost of one good extension cord is equal to a can of gasoline and a bottle of oil, and this extension cord will work much longer. Fourthly, the work of electric mowers on a sunny day is free for me.
That is, all energy-intensive work has been moved to the daytime, when there is a lot of sun. Sometimes washing can be postponed for a day, if this is not critical, for the sake of clear weather.
The load during the day can be seen in the following graph. Here you can see how the boiler turned on at 11 o'clock and it finished heating the water around 12 o'clock, at the same time other electrical appliances were turned on. After 13 p.m., an electric lawn mower was used when the output from the solar panels jumped sharply. If the excess energy could be sold, then the production schedule would be flat, and the surplus would simply flow into the network, where it would be consumed by my neighbors.
Thus, in 11 months, including cloudy autumn and winter, my solar power plant generated 1,2 megawatt hours of energy, which I got absolutely free.
The result of operation: TopRay Solar monocrystalline panels have not lost their efficiency over the year, since the output jumps even beyond the declared 2520 W (9 panels of 280 W each) with a non-optimal installation angle. You can live with the help of a solar power plant completely autonomously in summer, and economically in spring and autumn, if you refuse an electric stove and an electric kettle. Heating with electricity from solar panels is not possible. But in summer, the air conditioner works fine only due to the generated energy.
Access to the Internet
Last June, I tested the Tandem-4GR router from the Russian company Microdrive. It has proven itself so well that I even installed one copy in my car and it still provides me with access to the network while traveling. But at home, I put a parabolic mesh antenna, which has a minimum windage, and connected it to the second same router. But I was tormented by the thought of the need to reserve, because if the money on the balance runs out, the operator’s tower breaks or his communication channel falls off, then I will be left without access to the network. By the way, during the autumn thunderstorm, this is exactly what happened when the connection disappeared for 4 hours.
At the beginning of this year, the same company rolled out a device with support for two SIM cards on the market, and I could not pass by. I even released , which turned out to be just fantastically tenacious and easy to use. I mounted it on the antenna bracket and now I not only have the minimum distance from the emitter to the router, that is, I do not lose the signal on long wires, but the channel is also reserved for two different providers.
The router periodically pings the specified hosts and, if there is no response, switches to another SIM card. For the user, this goes completely unnoticed and this is a really useful feature. I was also lucky that the towers are approximately on the same line, since the “beam” of such an antenna is very narrow and the probability of receiving a good signal from two operators at once is not very high. But I solved a similar problem with a friend by using a panel antenna, the radiation pattern of which is noticeably wider. As a result, both operators work, but the main SIM card is the one where the operator gives more speed.
After installing this router, I forgot about the need to do anything with my network and now I only regret that the router supports LTE Cat.4 and has a 100 Mbps interface, preventing files from downloading even faster. Although one of the operators in my set of SIMs supports channel aggregation and is able to give a higher speed, but here I run into the speed of a hundred-megabit interface. Microdrive responds very willingly to the wishes of users and promises to release a router this year with support for LTE Cat.6 and a gigabit interface, which means it will be possible to have such a speed that a wired provider simply goes overboard. There is only one minus of the mobile Internet - the response time is noticeably higher than that of wired operators, but this is critical only for avid gamers, where there is a noticeable difference between 5 and 40 ms. Other users will appreciate the possibility of free movement.
Bottom line: two SIM cards are always better than one, and mobile operators fix problems on the line much faster than wired Internet operators. Already, routers with LTE Cat.4 support can compete in the price of monthly network access with wired providers, and when a router with LTE Cat.6 support appears, the difference in network access speed will be leveled and only a response difference of several tens of milliseconds will remain, which are critical only for gamers.
Conclusion
All the ideas laid down in the design of the house justified themselves. Warm water floors perfectly warm, having great inertia. I heat them with an electric boiler at the night rate, and during the day the floors slowly give off heat - enough without reheating at temperatures down to -15 on the street. If the temperature is lower, then you have to turn on the boiler for several hours during the day.
Once the well froze when it was -28 outside, but the well was not useful. I laid a self-regulating heating cable along the pipe from the well to the entrance to the house and this solved the problem. Should have done it in the summer. Now my mains heating turns on at night if the temperature outside is below -15 degrees. During the day, it is not necessary to turn it on, since the analysis of water is sufficient to defrost the ice that occurs during downtime.
A solar power plant often operates in UPS mode for the whole house, since in the private sector outside the city, shutdowns from half an hour to 8 hours are a common thing. This year, the power engineers did their best and there were no accidents from January to March, but with the onset of April, repair work began along the entire length of the lines and power outages became permanent. The second function of the solar power plant is the generation of its own energy: the first generated megawatt * hour of its own energy occurred in 10,5 months, including autumn and winter. And if it were possible to sell surplus generation to the grid, then the first megawatt would have been generated much earlier.
As for the mobile Internet, we can already safely say that in terms of speed it has approached the twisted-pair cable that most providers pull into apartments, and even higher in terms of reliability. This is noticeable by how quickly wired providers and mobile operators restore communication. In opsos, even if one tower “falls”, the router switches to another and communication is restored. And if the operator stopped working at all, then the dual-sim router simply switches to another operator and this happens unnoticed by users.
The pandemic and everything connected with it has demonstrated that it is much safer and more free to live in your own home: no passes to walk around the site, no neighbors with hyperactive children who will jump around the house, normal communication and the possibility of remote work, as well as redundant systems life support makes life very attractive.
And now I'm ready to answer your questions.
Source: habr.com