They’re both good looking setups guys. I’m jealous! And cheque’s from the generator company Skippy on a .60c tariff!? Niiiice.
I was a really early adopter... I bought my first solar panels in 1989, from memory paying about $400 each for 80W panels. Sine wave inverters were invented at that stage, but were totally unaffordable while synchronous inverters were still a dream! You could use modified square wave inverters (which were still expensive) for running incandescant lights but for everything else you needed 12v appliances. Consequently, my kids grew up watching The Simpson’s on a 4” B&W telly. They’re both high powered professionals now, so apparently it didn’t do them any harm. My eyesight though definitely suffered after 15 years of crap lights!
Being on the top of a windy hill, I also rebuilt and ran a 1930’s Dunlite 32V wind generator, (I was inspired by Michael Hackleman’s fantastic Home Built Wind Generated Electricity Handbook about the amazing 1930’s US built Jacobs wind generator - still a great book - written in the early 70’s - and still valid technology).
It’s good to see that the technology has both improved and become affordable. My house these days is a bit too forested in to be able to generate sufficient power for all of our needs (particularly through the winter months) but we still have a 1.5KW array feeding back into the grid with an entirely measly feedback tariff of .11c/ kwhr I think.
I’ve got a lovely sunny and windy few acres high on the hill about 300 meters from the house and will one day utilise it to build my own power station and as Tony mentioned, once 3 phase inverter technology becomes affordable I should be able to transmit decent currents over those distances without suffering unacceptable I squared R losses. With the exponential power price increases of the last 10 years, it becomes more and more affordable every day....
More power to all of you guys!
