TOOLS, TINKERINGS & CODE
Stopped by Bunnings on the way home tonight and picked up a bunch of miscellaneous venting hardware
Take the aluminum fly screen, cut it and fit to the back of each of the 5 louvre vents.
Fit two of those louvre vents to the top of the left hand side of the box
Fit the other two in the middle on the right hand side of the box
Fit the last one to the bottom of the door.
Place fly screen between the other vents, and place them in the floor of the meter box.
That should about fix my airflow I hope :D
As with all new things, I guess glitches are to be expected…
A week after my install was completed here’s a list of glitches.
I can will fix the last one, I’m going to cut some vents to match the vents on the inverter and fit with mesh and down pointed slats to keep out the rain.
I expect the others to be fixed when they come and replace the inverter, will let you know how that goes.
It is producing the minimum I expected as an annual average – which is the amount I estimated and budgeted on – so that’s not bad, but it’s not performing as well as it should.
And now, a picture of the array on my roof
Soooooooo it survived the 1st day – more or less
My Aurora PVA3600 AU suffered a fan failure – so next week it’s getting replaced. I’m told it should be perfectly safe, it’ll just reduce it’s workload to remain cool.
On a partially overcast cool winters day I produced 4.6kwh of power.
And without being here I consumed 1.6kwh of power.
Over night I expect to consume another 2.5 kwh of power personally, + the hot water (around 4kwh)
The math on this at the moment works as (1.6 + 2.5) * 18.843 + 4 * 7.689 – 4.6 * 18.843 = 21.3345 cents paid for power today:D
Once I get my new meter installed the math will work a little differently it will be
2.5 * 18.843 + 4 * 7.689 – (4.6 – 1.6) * 52 = -78.1365 * -1 = 78.1365 cents paid to me for power based on today :D
And for those who doubt me – here’s a before and after meter shot that shows the difference of about 3kwh
Believe me, a little panic took hold when I first, second and third read those meters – it looked like I’d added 8 kwh to my bill instead of taking any off it – it wasn’t till I worked out that every second (from the right) dial counted anti-clockwise that I got excited
I now have Solar Power (PV)
System Specifiactions
Total System Power: 3060 watts
Checked this morning and the inverter was live and operating at 5:45am (was “Waiting for sun” at 5:20am).
This weekend (providing the cat5 turns up) I’ve got to install some cat5 so I can access the RS232 port on the inverter.
Coming soon (See new “Solar” category on the left): photos and output graphing.
So umm..
Finally got around to jailbreaking my iPhone 3Gs on the weekend… Took me a year to get around to it.
It’s very very nice to have a fully customized set of ring/sms/email tones, now when someone elses phone goes off I don’t look for mine (seriously apple, how many iPhones on a train and only one farking email tone?!?)
I must say, if you’re even the slightest bit geeky, or know what ssh is, or simply want to sound different (screw thinking different) – I can recommend jailbreaking your phone.
Hit jailbreakme up if you’re on 4.0.1 or 4.0.0 firmware and don’t worry about the PDF exploit there’s an app to fix that in Cydia that’s a much smaller download than an entire iOS upgrade.
Here’s a couple of screenshots (Ok, I admit to being a bit of a StarTrek fan)…
