Posts in category "sustainable-living" - page 3
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How Much Money Did My Solar Panels Save? - 2023 Edition
A long time ago I wrote a post on how much money my solar panel was saving me. In the post I promised to write another post in November 2022 with updates. Well, lots of things happened and I completely forgot about it until one reader reminded me requesting for an update. So here it goes. It has been more than 2 years since I installed a 320W solar panel and I have been diligently collecting data from my panel, our consumption and how much we are pulling from the grid. Very recently I finally finished my code to fetch the data, massage it and used some nice libraries to draw the graphs so I can analyze the data.
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How I Waste My Time
You know, in a typical year after retirement, I noticed that I have been working on some repair or pet project at the rate of 1 or 2 per month. I don’t like to explain all of them, otherwise this blog will be just that – my repair/project blog. But once in a while I feel like I should write about these small projects. Otherwise many keep wondering what I do after retirement and how I am able to spend time. Generally I just tell these folks that I am busy with my family especially my daughter since she does not attend school (unschooled). After hearing this, most stop asking any more questions. It is not that I am working on any top secret projects. Just that these small project don’t qualify as something to write or talk about them.
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Savings Due To Solar Panel
Last year, around this time, I wrote a post on how much money my solar panel was saving us. I was supposed to write a follow up to it after one year, but I completely forgot about it. Thankfully, a reader reminded me to give an update and here I am. Unfortunately even after one year I still did not finish the software that was supposed to instantly tell me how much I am saving each month. I should be able to get that information because I have a bunch of sensors monitoring my solar panel system. They measure the power generated by the panel, the amount of power we are using at home and how much power we are drawing from grid. All that data is stored in the cloud in Firebase. Yet I did not finish that part of the software. And to think I am actually retired. Wonder where all my free time goes. Anyway, in this post I will give a guesstimate using our electricity bills as a proxy.
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DIY Projects
In an earlier post I talked about how we try to do repairs where possible and upkeep things to extend the life of some products. As an extension of that post, we also wondered how we could possibly cut costs by doing some things ourselves instead of buying stuff. This again while it seems like a frugal activity (which it is) also reduces the environmental impact. I know I am talking a lot about environment without even having a degree in it. Well, my life partner has a Masters degree in it (literally).
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How Much Money Did My Solar Panels Save?
It has been more than 6 month since I installed my lone 320W solar panel. So I wanted to check if it was doing me any favors and how much money is it saving. Normally one should wait for a full year to make any kind of useful analysis. But I get easily excited when it comes to doing any kind of data analysis and here I am at it again. It is a very small installation and hence the savings aren’t huge, but at least I am able to verify my predicted numbers (units of electricity) against the real numbers. Did I have any savings or was this whole solar panel project a waste of my time and money. Let’s find out.
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Getting The Most Out Of Solar Panels
It’s been a while since I updated you on my solar panel project. I thought I should continue where I left off. So after collecting all the data from my solar panels, batteries, grid and load, I observed something interesting. While the SMU was disconnecting the grid so that the load can run on batteries and solar energy, we are not fully utilizing the solar energy. During a perfectly clear day, the solar panel is generating more power than we can use during the day. The excess energy is just getting wasted. Can we do something about it?
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Giving Up Satellite TV
As part of minimalism, we try to reduce stuff from our life every now and then. Like Bruce Lee said, “hack away the unessential”. You may recall some of our minimalism activities from the past like selling our car or the minimalist wardrobe. This time around we wanted to experiment with cutting out satellite TV from our life.
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Solar Panel Performance And Energy Savings
Alright, so I got my solar panels and solar management unit setup all done. Now for the results. According to the spec sheet of my solar panel, it should be able to generate peak output of 320 W. And it certainly did. In fact on some rare occasions it actually produced more than the rated capacity! I was really surprised that something can outperform a spec sheet. From the spec sheet, the panel is supposed to produce 320 W with an irradiance of 1000 W/m2 under standard test conditions (STC). Whatever that means.
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Optimal Tilt For Solar Panels
You might have noticed that in my DIY solar panel setup, the mounting structures were conspicuously missing. That was not a mistake. Actually I looked at many solar panel mounting structures, but most of them are not adjustable. The few ones I found were either too expensive or for smaller panels. So I decided to go find a local metal works fellow and get it built. However, thanks to COVID lockdown and such I decided to go with something simple -- jugaad style instead. More on that later. But first, why is the tilt so important?
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Living a Semi-Urban Life
Some of you might know that I live on the outskirts of Bangalore. The reasons were two-fold
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