Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
Zinc, carbon fiber, a flowerpot and household chemicals. What's not to like?
He mentioned a flow battery. Could this be configured as such?
RM-S is like a stone skipping across a vast corpus of knowledge.
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Yep;
cheap as chips if space and weight isn't a problem.
No expensive charge controller reqd.
Then
DO we need a large expensive inverter!??
House lights run on a separate circuit to plugs. (Here. There?)
LED Lights run on ~3 volts and 0.01 to 0.02 Amps per bulb.
(The LED light bulbs in shops each have cheap, inefficient transformers built into them to get back down to ~3V DC)
That means that one could easily disconnect a house's lighting circuit from the HV AC system and wire in a small Solar and battery system for a start.
Other loads one could grow the system to:
If you have a string of eg; 3 volt cells in series a live wire after:
- 1 cell (series) gives 3 volts for LED lighting.
- 4 cells gives 12 volts for computers (sans expensive 'inefficient' PSU) etc.
- 37 cells gives 110 volts for std house and water heating.
ie: The same battery pack gives any voltage you want depending on where you attach the live
wire/s...
(You'd want more cells in parallel down at the lower voltages)
Then grow the system
for resistive loads. (heating)
The elements don't give a damn if the power's AC or DC as long as the Voltages are more or less the same.
About the only household appliances that actually need AC are things with AC motors in them.
That leaves an inverter required for things like; fridge, tumble dryer, etc, but not stove and geyser.
(Those motors could be swapped out for 'DC' motors at some point)
So
why the second mortgage for a 'So-lar-de-dah System', rather than a simple efficient (no conversion losses)
system you grow as funds allow..?
One that starts with with basics, like light.
While I'm at it: 
An emergency genset that runs 'The Basics' in your house during an outage, of say 10kw, has 20kw of heat going begging that's easy to plumb into a house with some EGR cooler from the breaker's and coils of copper pipe.
All of a sudden that inefficient genset is over 80% efficient..!
(Combined Heat and Power; CHP)
There is no heating load on it, so is 10kw now too little..?
Remember the transient high/peak loads are taken care of by the batteries.
Sand Battery (stored heat) for when it's off. (Cant get cheaper than that!)
So what does 'Town Gas' cost vs electricity..?