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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I was one of those. The bigger - and hidden - advantage to me was that my homebrew power setup (16 solar panels + a 2 KW windmill with a backup generator, and 48 KWh of batteries) was much more reliable than what Ontario Hydro & Power sold.

The fees are one thing, having your freezer contents spoiled a couple of times per year gets old really quickly, and in rural Ontario having a well stocked freezer is not optional. Especially in the winter the power would go out so frequently it was a serious limitation. Coming from NL, where powerfailures are so rare that they make the news when they happen this was one of those little things that I found it hard to adapt to. When the power in Canada fails you are in immediate trouble, your heater and sump pump no longer work, you risk all kinds of follow on damage.

So reliable power wasn't a luxury and it was relatively easy to get that sorted out to a degree that cutting the cord was a logical next step (because a grid connected system is supposed to shut down when the power fails, the only way out is to stop being grid connected).

Apropos high fees: the power company wanted some exorbitant fee for disconnecting us (the opposite of a connection fee), I asked them quite friendly what would happen if I shorted out the wires, 15 minutes later a truck came and someone pulled the road side fuses for free ;)

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Having dealt with Hydro One on permits and pole replacements from the telecom side of things, I can say that their methodology is not geared towards minimizing costs. They wanted me to pay $20,000 to replace 8 suspect / restricted insulators on one pole line, all of which were within 6 kilometers of each other. Done by a reasonable private contractor, all 8 insulators could have been done by a single crew in 1 day. Not Hydro One. Each one gets scheduled independently and assumes 2 hours of travel time to get to the job location (a not entirely unreasonable assumption for independent jobs, but ridiculous in the circumstances).

What's worse is when Hydro One's shortsightedness ends up costing them gobs of cash. I've seen brand new pole lines replaced within 2 years of being built because the ADET didn't leave any Spare Capacity on the poles. Add a communications strand and multiple poles need replacement. Since they had 6 phases of power on 60+ foot poles, Hydro One's replacement cost is north of $15k per pole. All because the lower class pole was maybe a few hundred dollars cheaper. #FAIL

I forgot to mention that Hydro Ottawa does the build for the future thing. Hydro Ottawa's design standards are to design for a minimum of 3 communications strands on all new poles. This results in significantly less make-ready on Hydro Ottawa poles. Hydro One in contrast has no such mandatory design standards, so whatever the ADET feels like on the day they're doing the design work is what gets installed.

I had a tangential WTF experience with Hydro One about a decade ago, but I’m not sure of this is typical for rural power operators.

I worked on an island on Lake of the Woods that was wired with power, phone and DSL. The next day, Hydro One was flying a branded helicopter up and down the chain of islands that were wired together to figure out where the lines were down.

The helicopter was absolutely bizarre to me and seemed like overkill, given that I only grew up in urban settings before. I though they might run a boat and walk the ROW. The helicopter seemed like an expensive toy they got to play with every so often.

That raises another difference between Hydro One and Hydro Ottawa: Hydro Ottawa has sensors on primary all over the network (something like every 3-5 km). The sensors make it possible to locate faults within a fairly small part of the distribution network almost instantaneously.

In contrast Hydro One has very few sensors, maybe one every 15 to 20 km in parts of the network, and sometimes no sensors at all on rural lines that can require driving 50+ km of line to find the fault. We routinely have 4-6 hour power outages, and a good chunk of the repair time is spent finding the fault. Again, Hydro One could install more reclosers on rural lines to isolate faults, but that doesn't seem to be the design philosophy they follow.

It's not entirely Hydro One's fault. Building a sensor network in rural Canadian shield geography is challenging as getting radio signals through rocks, hills and trees can be almost impossible, but I still think they can do better.

The sensor signals can travel through the power lines. No radio is necessary.

The company is supporting a lot of local contractors. Do you think they waste money because of incompetence or corruption?

Actually, Hydro One doesn't use local contractors all that much as it's heavily unionized. Even in discussions about permitting, hands are often tied as it is almost impossible to assign work previously done by union employees to external contractors or even those of us submitting permits.

For the last few years Hydro One has been trying to reform its internal processes for permits, and the folks in charge of that get huge amounts of push back internally, making the pace of change abysmally slow even though everyone knows they have a problem.

There is also the perverse incentives of operating a regulated utility. As they are usually the monopoly LDC in a given area, the amount profits they are permitted to generate are limited relative to their costs (somewhere around 10-15% iirc). This creates a perverse incentive to inflate costs as they are then permitted to generate larger profits. If they reduced costs and profits grew too large, they would be forced to lower rates, which is clearly a bad thing in the view of Hydro One management.

Thanks for explaining the root cause.

> because a grid connected system is supposed to shut down when the power fails, the only way out is to stop being grid connected

I've just had a tour of a hydrogen fuel cell setup we have here at our OB. I'm no electrician, but from what I could tell, it's plugged into the mains, currently drawing about 3KW, and hydrogen is producing another 12KW (we haven't got much demand for this event - the generator will produce 250kW if we want).

It comes in from the mains through an isolating transformer, into the generator and UPS, and then outgoing power to us goes through another isolating transformer (to stop mains hum that we saw last time, in both directions)

It seems it's perfectly fine to have this sort of setup connected to the grid in the UK. Obviously it's more expensive to do so than just wiring in your own diesel generator.

That's a very nice bit of kit that you have there. Pictures?

Yup. Fundamentally, the issue is whether there is any means by which locally-generated power can backfeed onto the mains. Typically cogeneration is handled by making the local generator have no ability to create the signal, it can only come from reading the line voltage. The mains voltage dies, there's no more signal to drive it and so even in case of failure it will shut down.

Any system which absolutely prevents backfeed is acceptable, your use of the mains charging the UPS and the UPS driving everything is an acceptable way to do it--even if your system goes nuts no circuit exists by which that power can backfeed. It's more typically done by a mechanical isolation switch, you can either be connected to the mains and rely upon the signal from the mains or you can run locally with no physical connection to the mains.

The reason for this is repairs. If a lineman opens a breaker the wires after that point must go dead no matter what--if your system backfeeds into the wire you could kill the guy working on the wires.

> It's more typically done by a mechanical isolation switch

Do you mean (automatic|manual) transfer switch? A transfer switch transfers the load to the generator and isolates the generator from the line side(utility side, or ‘mains’ for the two tiny islands that like silly words like ‘mains’)

A ‘mechanical isolation switch’ (safety switch, disconnect switch) is simply a disconnecting means.

The important part is the isolation. The fact that it also transfers to local power is important to the user, irrelevant to the power company. The power company only cares that there no failure mode that can cause local generation to feed back onto the line.

Whether it's a transfer switch, a local inverter that requires line power to operate or some other such system is irrelevant to them.

>because a grid connected system is supposed to shut down when the power fails, the only way out is to stop being grid connected

On that note I believe there are electrical devices that automatically disconnect you from the grid. It allows you to use a battery / solar array to power the house, while not feeding back any power to the grid such that you don't harm anyone trying to fix the grid.

Now whether or not this is allowed is very much dependent on which country you live in.

This video is in the UK and demonstrate such a device:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP51JjnWvLo

This is called an 'automatic transfer switch', it basically islands your off-grid installation when the power isn't available. As you already mention whether or not it is allowed is dependent on where you live. As it was the electrical inspectors in Northern Ontario were very much in bed with the power companies and typically would find all kinds of reasons to persuade renewable energy builders to let it go and rely on grid power. Given the state of some of the homebrew systems I've seen they probably had a point.

Automatic transfer switches were technically allowed but at the time I didn't know of a single installation in Northern Ontario that got a stamp of approval and was allowed to be operated un-attended in grid connected mode.

There is some risk, but this is usually exaggerated, the theory goes that a lineman should be able to disconnect a segment and then it should be idle, requiring all renewable installations down-grid to disable themselves. As a rule this is fully automatic anyway because all of the grid connected inverters that I'm aware of stop working as soon as the grid fails because they use the grid to supply them with phase and frequency information required to function.

But that wasn't good enough, the installation needed to be physically disconnected from the grid, requiring a very large relay and somehow it then had to reconnect if the grid came back on for a specified minimum amount of time (I forgot the details). By the time I had worked all this out I figured since I'm going to be in island mode anyway most of the time I may as well take the shortcut, cut the grid entirely (saving a considerable amount of money in the progress) and invest the difference into a nice genset (which I did, a 5.8KW Kubota diesel).

What was the thinking around diesel vs natural gas?

Do you just use heating oil? How do you manage that it has a limited shelf life?

Natural gas is very likely unavailable in remote areas. Usual fuels would be propane or diesel, which can be trucked in.

People seem to think Natural Gas just magically makes its way down the lines. NG requires power as well. If power is out for any period of time you lose natural gas soon after due to compression stations going offline unless you happen to be one of the lucky ones who lives off a branch that is self-powered.

https://geekprepper.com/how-long-will-natural-gas-last-witho...

That article is from 2015. The bulk of natural gas infrastructure is self powered these days because declines in gas prices since then have made that a comparatively better option in more places and the natural attrition and upgrade cycle of equipment.

I don't think "the bulk" is true.

Last year's deadly winter storm in Texas showed that a lot of natural gas infrastructure does indeed rely on electricity.

(New) Compressor stations now must now be electrically powered to get permitted by the federal forces that be. (With very few exceptions.)

Even replacing compressors that were self powered now need to be electric.

It doesn't make any sense, except that it's another regulatory expense resulting in both higher cost and less reliability.

It does make sense - just not by the metrics you're judging it. If what you care about is carbon emissions, electrical power is better. If what you care about is system reliability native fuel power is better.

A lot of times when people say 'Thing thing makes no sense' what they mean is 'This thing doesn't agree with my priorities'

Oh, sorry, I didn't actually mean "natural gas that comes from a magic pipe" -- I meant propane that sits in a big tank in the backyard. I know intellectually that they're different gases, probably with different numbers of carbons in the molecule, but I have the bad habit of using them interchangeably....

In the "rural" areas I spend the most time in (cape cod, not exactly rural but also with sketchy utilities) people mostly have generators running off of big (well, probably medium sized) propane tanks that I imagine may also be used for cooking / heating as well.

I'm more curious about the stability of the fuel over the long term if it isn't cycled often, where I imagine propane / NG has an advantage, but I guess if you're using it as backup to solar and wind, there's an expectation that you'll go through a couple tanks a winter regardless so stability isn't as much of an issue.

Propane and methane are very different, and you should be careful about the differences if you use either. Propane is almost always sold as liquefied propane gas (LPG) at a relatively low pressure, whereas natural gas is almost always sold in its pressurized or compressed gaseous form. The most important difference is that if you have a natural gas leak, it will 'float' in the air, and dissipate; propane will (dangerously) 'sink', and pool around the source, and is liable to explode. Indoor propane installations should always have at least one propane detector.

LPG stands for liquified petroleum gas, which is sometimes just propane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquefied_petroleum_gas

> Propane and methane are very different, and you should be careful about the differences if you use either.

Also be careful to note that "natural gas" is mostly methane but with a significant mix of heavier hydrocarbons too.

Natural gas was possible but would require more capital up front, a lot more space and a specially prepared site for the tank, annual safety inspections and a place for a 40' truck to deliver it and turn around again (and of course it still required the genset itself). Diesel was by far the easiest solution, especially because we used the generator infrequently and once the windmill was up not at all.

We used wood for heat and limited shelf life for diesel is not an issue at all (it is for ethanol based gasoline).

From experience, you can get through a couple of big propane tanks per year just using it for cooking.

In practice the lineman risk isn't as real as it seems at first. Odds are when the lineman shutdowns a segment, if your system tries to supply power there are enough other people on the segment that you will trip your local overload protection and isolate the grid.

I don't blame lineman for not wanting to trust that though. My understanding is their practice is to always short out the line when working on them as that is the only way to be 100% sure it isn't live. (note that linemen work on live lines all the time, but when they need a dead line they ensure it is dead)

Agreed. But given what I've seen in some off-grid installations I really don't blame them. And I have seen one installation that tried to supply all of Ontario when it didn't go off-line as it should have, that wasn't a really pretty sight. The inverter died quite spectacularly, judging by the scorch marks on the wall above it, all of the magic smoke had definitely gone out of that one.

My uncle was a lineman and lost his leg due to this issue.

Here in the US Midwest I recently observed some crews repairing a fault just upstream of me, and the last thing they did before reconnecting to upstream of that fault was disconnecting a set of yellow cables which were obviously grounding the downstream wires.

Layers of protection. Laws on what can backfeed into the grid, ground the wires, wear safety gear. No different than in computer science using both a firewall AND salting your password. The more layers, the less likely 1 mistake gets you.

Exactly. If you want to get fired in a hurry from any utility or large plant: override someone else's lock-out. If they don't beat you into a coma first.

Those are called grounding clusters, sibling comment explains why.

Just adding from an experience researching solar for a condo development - if you want the fire department to try to save your house, you need to be able to cut the panels off, grid connection or not.

Likewise, putting panels on both sides of the roof makes it difficult, if not impossible, to vent a fire through the roof. The figures are ever changing, but the additional weight of many panels can also be a consideration when fighting a fire.

Really urge anyone considering adding solar panels on their home to speak with their local fire/ems prior to installation/signing a contract to be sure you know their requirements (and in many places this is still evolving).

I am not familiar with house fires or how to fight them.

> putting panels on both sides of the roof makes it difficult, if not impossible, to vent a fire through the roof.

If a fire is bad enough to need to be vented from a hole in the roof, wouldn't the building likely be lost already?

Even if the building is lost, the firefighters still want to put it out to keep it from spreading.

A few weeks ago, the Mount Charleston Lodge in Las Vegas burned to the ground. Firefighters put most of their effort into saving the surrounding national forest.

Not in my experience. There was a fire in the third floor unit of a building I was living in (one floor up and one unit over). It was a three floor building, so that was a roof unit. The firefighters cut vent holes and were able to contain the damage to that unit.

If you're building condos, you aren't in a rural area.

In my rural area, everyone ground mounts because space is cheap. I'm a volunteer firefighter and so far none of the trainings have mentioned solar (venting roofs yes). But then, we joke that we'll arrive just in time to put out your foundation.

Isn’t the new NEC including a provision for a cutoff switch at the meter?

Yes, that was added in NEC 2020. Whole-house disconnect just after the meter, on the exterior of a residence.

Automatic Transfer switches are very common in Server Rooms and datacenters where there is a Generator in use. I'm not sure why they are not more common in Solar. I have a parent with a full house generator that also has a Automatic Transfer Switch, its essentially right above the breaker box. the breaker box either gets power from the generator, OR from the power company, never both. When power comes back on, the ATS senses it, and sends a signal to the generator after 30 seconds or so that it is switching over, and to shut down.

Grid tied home solar is usually about economics (and sometimes happy feelings), not reliability.

If you want automatic transfer, you need to add storage, and a more complex inverter that can operate in bridge tied and island mode, and that cuts into the economics. You might also need to get more panels to handle projected loads during projected outages, but most net metering tarrifs I've seen won't compensate you if you over generate.

I can assure you that reliability factors in heavily in Grid tied home solar.

That must depend on the area.

People in the Netherlands or the UK have reliable power anyway, but there are still some home solar installations.

That varies greatly. In my area, the grid is extremely reliable. I rarely see systems that are setup to handle outages as the cost isn't really worth it on its own.

This. Normal solar relies on the grid as it's "storage". The economics of solar become very different if you have to provide local storage.

This is also why there is an ongoing fight over net metering and in some places solar connections aren't even allowed. So long as solar is a small fraction of the total power it has basically zero effect on the grid. Now, however, there are a lot of solar setups. Look what happens to the grid:

The total delivered power drops, but the peak power (when the cloud passes in front of the sun and all those panels quit working) stays the same. They need to spend just as much on generators as before but they aren't selling as much power. Historically, the cost of being able to produce the power has simply been folded into the cost of the power but with the two going out of sync this model no longer applies. Solar gets a substantial hidden subsidy from this, without this subsidy solar is almost never economic.

Second, look at what happens when *lots* of homes go solar. Lets say the local substation is delivering 1000A of power to it's area. Lots of panels go up, the combined power is 1500A. Now the substation transformer is being asked to push 500A back up to the distribution wires--and it's probably not built to survive that. Either those substations must be upgraded or the power company simply prohibits the situation from arising the in the first place by not allowing too much solar on any given segment.

1) we here in Germany, for non-standard connections (including using the grid as backup for local generation), have split price between max-power-reached-in-any-15min-rolling-average, and per-kWh. The former is low-medium single-digits per kW and year, depending on whether you hook up to the 6kV (to neutral; low-voltage would be 240V) medium voltage or they have to keep a 6kV->240V 3-phase transformer ready for you.

At 20-30ct/kWh, this sums up to (assuming low-voltage) 0.3% duty cycle getting you to spend as much on energy as you spend on power/capability.

As for the substation: it doesn't care beyond possibly having to switch some taps that are used to correct for load-current-dependant voltage drop in that 6kV network, but I doubt they get anywhere near their delivered voltage limits in normal operation, anyways.

I believe that inverters with integrated transfer switches are more common these days, due to the popularity of battery systems like Powerwall. I was reading the manual for one, and it had both a grid connection (to your main panel), and a "protected power" connection for a subpanel that will remain powered regardless of grid power.

They must still have some kind of internal transfer switch (as opposed to double conversion), but I would think as a single listed device with anti-islanding, they would be a lot easier sell to an inspector. Then again that AHJ sounds a bit dodgy ("specified minimum amount of time") so maybe they're still resisting.

Reminds me of the days when you needed written permission from the telco in order to connect a fax machine or modem to the phone line. I remember standing in line at the local phone company office and explaining to a nice chain-smoking office lady (you could still smoke in windowless offices in those days) what a "modem" was and why I wanted to plug one into their sacred network.

Err wasn’t that correct in hindsight with robocalls and whatnot becoming prevalent?

It is quite reasonable--the idea is that your local system must not backfeed power even in case of failure. You don't rely on how it should operate, it must be *impossible* for a failure to backfeed.

Thus, physical switches. The power company doesn't care what throws the switch, just that it exist.

The problem here is that different power suppliers in different locations have different standards here. My 6.6kW array here in rural New Mexico is connected to the grid via an inverter that will, putatively, shutdown if the grid side drops.

How does the inverter make it impossible for a failure to happen? How different is this from an automatic transfer switch (which would not be allowed)?

What they usually do is design the inverter to only use line power as the reference to generate the output. No sine wave from the line, the circuit is completely unable to produce an output and thus shuts down even in case of failure.

> Now whether or not this is allowed is very much dependent on which country you live in.

So basically, to clarify, you're either 100% on the grid, or 100% off. There's no using both depending on conditions, is that it?

You can have a backup generator (with a transfer switch)--which many do in more rural areas at least in the US.

I'm not sure about Ontario, but in many places you can be grid tied which means that you use both. While it is possible to change depending on conditions, the equipment to do that isn't very common. Solar systems are just starting to come out with single outlets that can run while the sun shines without the grid, but that is rare, most assume 100% on grid, or 100% off grid.

The vehicle I'm currently sat in at the moment has a 32A electrical cable running in the back, currently pulling 2881W into a magic box provided by victron inverter/charger, that is used to charge a battery (which is currently fully charged). That battery is currently being drained at a rate of 2881W to run the equipment (via the inverter back to 230V)

If I pull the 32A cable, everything carries on working (I believe it's a sub-20ms switchover). If the power goes for some other reason it carries on working. The truck can run on a 230V/13A source just as well (although when the aircon is on - not needed currently - we'll be pulling more than 13A so the battery will slowly drain). I can even plug into two different inputs.

Now this is a mobile vehicle, and I'm no electrician, but my understanding is this is perfectly fine -- the victron presumably switches from the grid if the input is lost and doesn't feed anything back into the grid.

Presumably the same setup could be used to power a home instead of several racks of equipment in the back of a truck.

That Victron box has an automatic transfer switch in it, and is certified for permanent grid connection.

That depends on your generation capacity and what the rules of your grid are.

If you're capable of producing enough power to run your home most of the time, then being grid connected and buying peak load from the grid itself rather than browning out your own devices might be a worth while tradeoff.

Most of us with grid tied solar installations (like me) transparently buy and sell electricity to and from the grid depending on day conditions. I buy from the grid overnight, and sell excess capacity during the day. Depending on how much electricity you use a battery system will smooth those out, but you need a lot of batteries to eliminate the need completely (OP mentioned 48KWh, which is about 3.5 Power Walls).

In my area the grid is really reliable and fees are low, so buying batteries is not economically viable. I'm currently paying $5.24 per month for a grid tie, which is below my threshold for caring.

It's also more viable to be grid tied if your winter needs are more than X times your summer needs. My 6.6kW array generates roughly 3x what we need during summer. But our home is heated in winter (at 6000' in New Mexico) using electrically powered air-source heat pumps (aka "minisplits") and that takes about 3x what we generate during the winter.

Adding either on-site storage capacity or sufficient additional panels to cover our winter needs really makes no sense. The storage capacity would have to be immense, because no matter how you slice it and dice it, we do not generate enough power to heat our home for several months (and that's with adobe and some passive design). The additional panels would take up a large amount of ground space, and result in us generating 9x our needs in summer.

I prefer to put my faith in the emergence of grid-scale storage solutions than try to solve this on a just-my-home level.

If the grid wasn’t reliable, a hypothetical I know, it would probably be cheaper to switch over to a ground source heat pump rather than increase your panels by 3x. That would lower your winter electricity demand, albeit at the cost of significant capital expenditure.

Does a ground source HP use that much less electricity than an air source HP?

Yes, by far. It’s much easier to extract heat from ~55F ground water than from ~20F exterior air. Ditto for dumping excess heat into ~55F ground water than 90F exterior air. On average the water coming out of a geothermal loop will be more advantageous to work with than exterior air, which is why it’s a thing.

In some areas, there is both, but it requires having a correctly installed automatic disconnect, that cuts you off from the grid if the grid loses power.

Many/Most home solar installations do not correctly install one, which can be dangerous to linemen.

I'm getting a manual transfer switch installed - I live in the city (although it's rural-ish where I live) but we get occasional power outages and it's often enough (and long enough) to be worth the annoyance of getting a generator and switch installed, but not enough for me to shell out big $$$ for a natural gas generator and automatic transfer switch to ensure 100% uptime for my house.

This works well as long as there is a reasonably high chance of someone being in the building when the power fails. For many rural setups (for instance: weekend cottages) that isn't the case so more and more inverters come with an automatic transfer switch built in or for a small surcharge as an option.

Or if you travel. If I ever get a generator installed (with automatic transfer switch), it would be primarily for the case of a power outage during the winter when I'm not around.

Not even which country, which sub-entity within your country. Here in America it's going to vary on a state by state basis.

> rural Ontario having a well stocked freezer is not optional. Especially in the winter the power would go out so frequently it was a serious limitation.

This sucks, but is it not cold enough to put freezer items outside?

You try lugging a whole deer's worth of venison outside to the snow every time your power goes out

Sure, that should take less than 20 minutes and I'd get my workout in for the day.

Also, are there not bears in rural Ontario? If there are bears (or other large predator animals) in the environment, putting food outside can be very dangerous.

Bears aren't usually a problem in the winter, with hibernation and all...

Only black bears, even in summer they're dangerous to the food, but not really that dangerous to you (as long as you act reasonably). Racoons are more dangerous to food, too.

There are bear proof barrels, which are frequently used for camping (and I'm not sure if I'd bet on them against a bear, but they keep racoons out), or if you don't have them you can tie your food up a tree and that does a pretty good job too.

I think the idea was to have the freezer permanently in a cold place like a shed attached or very close to the house.

And now every time you want something from the freezer you have to suit up. And forget grabbing food during a snowstorm.

How often are people going in their freezer??? I barely use mine. You grab something, cook up a week's worth of food. If you run out during a snowstorm, you just cook pantry food.

Are you made of sugar?

Cold storage like that is pretty common in the North (as are raccoon proof locks ;) ), and many people run outdoor woodstoves which require going outside to keep them running at least once every two days or so.

Snowstorms are rare enough, even in Northern Canada that you can usually wait it out. If it lasts for days then that's a different story, but I only recall one multi-day blizzard over the five years that I was there.

Canada also has summer.

No, Canada has only two seasons: winter and construction.

Everyone always talks about Florida not having seasons. That's a lie. We have four seasons, just like everyone else:

first summer, SUMMER, second summer, and sprautumn.

Madrid has 9 months of winter and 3 months of hell (nueve meses de invierno y 3 de infierno).

The solution to that is underground storage (root cellar):

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/store-wine-underground-inside-...

A chest freezer in a garage or porch solves this problem and will stay safely cold for days.

I'm hardly the strongest guy in the world but that doesn't listen exactly seem like a very strenuous effort. Am I missing something? Hell I'd probably just keep everything Ina chest freezer in the garage or shed year round located on an external wall

It's pretty darn heavy. The solution of course is to cut it into manageable pieces before freezing.

Frozen food is supposed to stay below 0 F (-18 C) [1]. It will be cold outside, but it probably isn't going to stay below 0 F all day every day. For example, the average January high in Timmins, Ontario is +13 F.

1: https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/safe-food...

> Coming from NL

Given the Canadian context, do you mean the Netherlands or Newfoundland and Labrador?

> When the power in Canada fails you...

I think contextually the very next sentence gives you your answer here.

In a latter comment he says he moved “back to Europe” and links to his site reveal a Dutch looking name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28999144

Netherlands.

Oh, I had assumed Newfoundland and Labrador because of, as you say, the Canadian context. So it was actually Netherlands.

I've been interested in how to do this -- in particular, how you tie in your solar inverter, windmill, and batteries together. Are you using AC to tie everything together, or are you able to use DC everywhere until you use it?

You can do it either way.

Tying together with DC usually works out cheaper, since MPPT tracking buck converters to charge the batteries are cheaper than having extra inverter capacity.

As a bonus, you can buy quite a lot of 12V DC equipment made for cars and caravans which tends to be a lot more energy efficient.

Modern systems with multiple DC sources are usually all tied to a common DC bus (24-60V depending) that is parallel with the batteries. Devices called charge controllers take the unregulated DC from a DC source (PV, Wind, hydro...) and output a constant voltage which can be used to charge the batteries or be directly consumed by the inverters. The inverter takes care of tying the DC bus to the AC side of things including the grid and/or generator. Modern DC tied inverters perform multiple functions as they can be programmed to use AC or DC as the source, charge the batteries and even feed power back into the grid.

AC as much as you can. Wiring thickness quickly becomes a limiting factor so you site your inverters right next to your battery banks and you keep your solar voltage as high as your inverter allows you to (up to 400V these days).

Is 2 kW a typo? That's pretty small. I typically see 12-15 kW residential turbines.

2 KW is a 5 meter diameter windmill, which is pretty large for a homebrew. 12-15 KW turbines are major feats of engineering, I would not trust myself to put together something that size, besides the gear required to put it up. A 2 KW machine has an alternator/blade combo that weighs close to 100 Kg, about the limit of what you can raise and lower with normal equipment. Keep in mind that it sits on top of a 10 to 20 meter high tower, which makes raising and lowering it a job all by itself.

Thanks, I just did some researching thinking I was right and I was the one who was mistaken.

Yes, you are correct: 12 kW are a big install:

https://en.wind-turbine-models.com/turbines/1579-windkraft-z...

https://en.wind-turbine-models.com/turbines/1664-psw-en-driv...

> having your freezer contents spoiled a couple of times per year gets old really quickly

This is now becoming a reality for more and more people in the Bay Area due to a combination of corruption and failing infrastructure.

Where I am in SF it seems to be the opposite. Until a few years ago the power would go out every time it rained heavily but at some point they fixed it and now we get electricity when it rains. (Major roads still become impassable when it rains because it happens infrequently enough they’re not built with a camber.)

There aren’t rainwater drainage systems for SF roads? Seems surprising.

280, the main motorway out of SF has standing water on it every time it rains heavily. Seems to be built with a different profile to motorways in UK which are cambered for the rain to run off. Guess it must just not be worth it given how rarely it rains heavily here.

Yeah SF right now seems to be the most resistant to power outages just because it’s not going through our fire prone nature preserves

How long are your power cuts? If you keep it shut, a freezer is fine for 24-48h

Yeah so far it’s slightly below 48 hours, but I have a feeling it will get worse.

> Coming from NL

NL in this context is Netherlands? Or another area of Canada?

Probably Newfoundland

Do you have any blog posts and pictures of your setup? I'm quite curious to hear how it is working!

There are quite a few posts about this, it was working splendidly right up to the point where I moved back to Europe.

https://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill/

https://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-build-a-windmill-ii/

Cool. I always wondered why you chose St. Josephs Island to settle from Europe. Solar costs have certainly gone down since then.

They're a fraction of what they used to be, the panels that I bought back then you can now have for 20% of the price or so. Funny enough, installation costs have gone through the roof so effectively you still pay just the same for the total installation unless you do it yourself. You'd expect that increased competition would drive down installation costs but it didn't really work out that way. I'd stay away from movable panels, it was a lot of work to put it in and cost quite a bit, for that money you can now buy far more panels which more than offsets the ability to aim them better.

Installing a windmill is something that I would not advise for novel installations unless you have a lot of room around you and quite a bit of spare time. Windmills, compared to solar are finicky devices and require a lot of thinking to get them right, solar power is much simpler.

The 'DIY powerwall' scene has turned recycling Li-Ion batteries into an art form, not all of it is done safely but some of the results are quite impressive, battery power too is now a fraction of what it cost back then and the life-span has gone up considerably, with more and more interesting options right around the corner.

Thanks for the detailed answers! As for location, how/why did you end up at St. Joseph Island?

When moving to Canada I didn't know much about the country so I rented a car in Toronto and drove out West all the way to Vancouver and back stopping along the road every hour or so to see what it was like there. St. Josephs Island really stood out from that trip so that's where I ended up.

I got blackballed for life at Avis for that stunt, they had an 'unlimited mileage' two week offer for very little money, they gave me a brand new car, I averaged 1000 per day or so :)

Did you have to take it in or swap, so the car could get an oil change?

I just returned it at the end of the two week period.

It was nicely broken in by then.

I really enjoyed reading the first post about how you went about it. Impressive.

Thank you, that was a lot of fun. Current project: maximum range e-bike :)

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