[LINK] Free Sydney Smart Home

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Richard,

Curious why you didn't connect to the Grid in wentworth 
falls. I'm currently looking at PVs in Annandale - feeding 
the grid seems to make sense (the sun will be shining 
somewhere on the grid) - though the economics are still 
challenging.

With regard to the water tanks, I have oscillated. They 
aren't much use in drought but seem to work well in Sydney's 
evenly distributed rainfall climate. Ecologically it makes 
sense to try and maintain the water level of a property with 
hard surfaces - through water retention systems.

Marghanta

Richard Chirgwin wrote:
<snip>
> Solar became challenging. Dec-Jan in Wentworth Falls was wet as often as 
> not; so you learned that batteries drain fast and charge slow! We had to 
> run the generator on about five days (but the batteries were serving 
> five cottages - the main house plus four holiday renters). Discipline 
> with the lights became second nature (even though none of the lights 
> were more than 11W fluoros).
> 
> Doing some intensive computing work, I got a genuine shock at how much a 
> MacBook Pro could suck from the batteries. I left a long calculation 
> running overnight, and woke to find about 20% of the storage dissipated 
> as heat. Luckily it was a sunny couple of days to follow ... My lesson, 
> should I "go solar", will be to get too much battery storage.
> 
> But as to a computer running the thing? OK, I'll go with Ivan that 
> people need to learn what uses how much (although without aircon or 
> flat-screen, my home is pretty simple to figure), but once you know 
> what's going on, the system becomes a redundant user of power.
> 
<snip>
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://ramin.com.au
Tel: 0414-869202