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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Our utility up here is pretty much a “you’re lucky we even offer you power” type, so yeah they have nothing for as far as rate incentives or the like. At this point the idea is to operate as if we are off grid, as to only pay the utility access fee (or completely disconnect if possible, I know there are certain legalities with that I need to look into as California tends to frown upon off grid living when utilities are available). Same reason I want a well and have a city water connection as backup. Sewer, trash collection, and Internet would be from local providers.

    My current train of thought is, depending on the inverter and charge controller, is to draw direct from solar during the day and batteries at night. Again I haven’t done load calcs, but system sizing depends on max average load during the day while simultaneously charging the batteries. Again a lot of this depends on the house orientation on the lot we get, and how I can balance the design of the house with technical requirements.

    I haven’t even gotten into which batteries I’d go for, but I’m leaning towards off the shelf 12/24vdc industrial batteries that I can easily swap as opposed to a monolithic prepackaged system from a company that I may not be able to service myself. My goal is to remain manufacturer agnostic so I don’t run into servicing issues.



  • Good to know about the refrigerant, I haven’t even begun to consider different types of systems.

    I didn’t think about the descaling, that’s definitely something to consider. My prime consideration with them was a) save on the extra piping, b) not have to wait for hot water to arrive, wasting water in the process (mountains, it gets a bit nippy up here), c) not have to operate a circ pump. I wouldn’t necessarily mind an electric tank WH, I just thought it’d be nifty having instant hot water in each room and not worrying about the tank running empty.

    And yeah since we’re building from scratch, I intend on designing the roof with to accommodate as many panels as necessary (I haven’t even begun to do the load calcs for anything yet. In a perfect world, I’d want the front of the house facing north, leaving the entire south side of the house available for solar without cluttering up the curb appeal. Since we don’t have net metering where I’m at, I also have my eye on a battery system primarily for night operation and outages (they’re frequent up here), and as essentially a whole house UPS.







  • Same here, probably around 2015. My wife has one due to being in real estate and not understanding the finer points of data privacy (read: doesn’t care at all), so I just use hers to browse marketplace on the rare occasion I’m looking for something. You best believe all of her devices have their own network segment at our house isolated from the rest of our gear lol.