OFFGRIDING
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# Posted: 9 Aug 2011 10:27pm
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Hi, my first post from northern Coromandel in New Zealand. I have a 10m2 cabin on 25 acres of designated conservation land.
We are truly off-grid, even cell phone reception is poor (will get satellite broadband some day).
We always planned to build a "real" house on the property to live there full time and are busy doing that now - maybe house done by Christmas?
In anticipation for this we used the last 5 years to try, test and develop our solutions to sewage, rain water and power.
WOW I learned a lot and am happy to share my 20/20 hindsight!
The power system we have is an overkill for the 10m2 cabin but it has proved its worth and has helped me to be able to formulate a valid approach to off-grid design
and to discard most equipment supplier "advice" because it somewhat myopic - only see their own interest or well intended but failing to see the whole picture.
We made some decisions that drove the project.
Most important was the fridge - need to keep food fresh, its 2 hrs to the supermarket. Once we had an inverter to provide AC then the marginal extra load from lights, stereo and mobile device charging was covered in the inverter being big enough to support the starting current of the fridge.
We ran wind initially; PV was always in the plan but I wanted to understand our site wind patterns. It was good initially we have good wind near the coast, but the La Nina weather pattern brings long calm periods and storms. So wind for us is unreliable.
Once we introduced our PV panels we have much more stable power and will use these on into the house phase.
We still have an issue around PV being sunny day dependant and our system design allows for standby generation to kick in when batteries drop to 75% DOD which if there is wind is seldom but otherwise (and we get easy 5 days in row with no wind in the bad times) ....
My plan is to complete construction of the bio-gas digester to power the generator.
Anyway – enough of an intro.
Peace
Charles
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