PA DETAILER
Well-known member
- Mar 5, 2011
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H O T Supposed to cool down Thursday.
what's your weather currently like?
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chilly
Well-known member
- May 13, 2006
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It is interesting, solar has become more mainstream in Alaska; however, people don't use batteries here
They just let the solar chug along and run the house if it can and more importantly, back feed to the utility where they "bank it" and take it off your usage in the winter
Nobody is interested in a battery backup for critical stuff, even the couple of dealers I talked to were surprised I was even asking about it
Big Dave
Well-known member
- Jan 7, 2018
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Even though we've had solar for almost 5 years now, all of our power was coming from the grid, and the solar was sold back to the grid, and at way less than they were charging us for grid power. I won't go in to the politics, but the power companies were scamming us, with the support of government, and it wouldn't matter who you voted for. But with the battery we got a new smart inverter, and now we run off solar first, then battery, and finally grid, and the solar will charge the battery before sending to the grid. The app is telling me we are running at almost 95% self sufficiency.
We will be switching power companies soon to one that allows us to sell excess power from the battery back into the grid when the wholesale price is high, like at night when everyone is cooking, heating their homes and watching TV etc. and there's no solar coming in to the grid to keep prices down.
Anyway, this is today, and probably tomorrow.
chilly
Well-known member
- May 13, 2006
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Hawaii was pretty much the same as you described, although the politics were probably even more crooked. The one single utility company simply said we aren't allowing any more backfeed period, and just shut off new applications on a specific date. People who had applied prior to the cutoff date were waiting 4-5 YEARS for their applications to be processed. Those who were allowed to backfeed got pennies on the dollar so it was hardly worth the effort. We had 24 panels, a smart inverter, and a full rack of 6 backup cells and were pretty much self sufficient. Most months we were only charged the $35 fee JUST for the privilege of being hooked up to the grid. The island we lived on, Molokai, had the second highest electric rate in the nation, right after Lanai, our neighboring Island