Guru
Joined: 22/10/2019
Location: AustraliaPosts: 952
| Posted: 10:27am 23 Sep 2025 |
Welcome to the forum Bush. Just to give you some idea of what can be done, I am like Bryan and a fan of forklift batteries.
I bought my first one, a 48V 980aH for $500 (scrap value)
I installed 19kW of secondhand panels and built 4 MPPT charge controllers ... see Poida's thread
I built a 15kW Warpverter , though that is a fairly major undertaking ... but there are a lot more options nowadays for hybrid inverters.
We have an all electric home except for gas hot water, two ovens and a pool etc ... all power hungry devices.
I also added another 10kW Goodwe inverter ac-coupled to the Warpverter (cost me $200 and only a year or two old).
Because we regularly have far more power than we can really use, I have connected up two underfloor heaters that were here when we bought the place ... but would never have dared hooking up.
It's not unusual for us to have over 10kW of heating turned on for 6-8 hours a day if the sun is cooperating.
Now I definitely have to manage the system and keep an eye on charge levels and all that sort of stuff ... but the rest of the family lives exactly like we were on the grid ... they simply have no clue or understanding or interest even in what's going on in the background.
Our last 5 quarterly bills have come in at less than $50 all up since we've been off grid. We can still use the grid for backup or charging if the weather is not good ... but we do not feed into it and have an auto changeover switch that keeps us totally seperated unless the inverter fails or we switch it off ... then we seamlessly drop back to grid power.
I have since bought some more forklift batteries to add to the mix, so we can use more heating early mornings and in the evenings.
We used to average 20-22kWh/day ... but now are up around 40kWh coz it's free and we can find uses for it.
So far the Warpverter has generated 17MWh since March last year ... and the four MPPTs have supplied just over 19MWh. The ac-coupled Goodwe is not included in those numbers.
Let us know where you are located and what sort of outcome you really want to achieve.
