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Comment by cyri | Hacker News Reader

I did build my own solar system too. In Switzerland.

Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.

I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.

All prices without state funding: Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.

I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.

Should write a blog post about it :-)

Next project is a solar fence with 6kWp.

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What do you do with that much electricity? Was it necessary to over-dimension for winter?

If you have an EV that can be charged only at night, a big battery is required.

For solar excess charging I use evcc.io

When I charge the car via battery then only down to ~75% for now. The remaining energy is needed by the house during winter months.

I would also be interested in the reasoning here!

Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr. ~€11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much experience as the dog next door).

If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered better, as our production is really low as we have a 10° flat roof installation.

Of course it is a bit oversized.

We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery.

We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year. The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy gets fed back into the grid.

We’re currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(

FYI: Neighborhood-level connections are changing starting next January (look up RCP and CEL).

They're in Switzerland.

Yes, how neighborhood-level connections are setup in Switzerland is changing next year.

See eg https://www.swissolar.ch/fr/connaissances/nouvelle-loi-sur-l... (post written in French)

How much did you pay for the panels, and what's your capacity factor? (Kilowatt hours produced on average per nominal peak kilowatt.)

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