Author Topic: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System  (Read 14209 times)

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Offline solarnewbee

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y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« on: May 22, 2016, 08:09:43 pm »
So,,,,

I have received lots of great feedback from other like Oz, RF, Ross, Lachlan, Dan and others. Oz suggested I put my project here to keep better track and solicit feedback and please, kind criticisms so that I might improve the system overall.

Sketches to follow and pics.

 this will be a completely
I am working with the PowerJack 8000w LF pure sine wave inverter that's been blessed by Oz and I will be making adjustments recommended by same. Only difference being that mine has a built in MPPT solar panel charge controller and the toroid coil takes up all of the space to the left of the main and control boards, whereas Oz's had 2 toroid coils.

system will have as follows:

1). 20-300w poly panels 10 each on the eastern side of the 2nd floor roof and 10 each on the western side of same roof at the recommended 10 to 15 degree incline (southerly?)

2). 24v PJ 8000w inverter

3.) 1 2400w pma wind turbine connected thru an MPPT charge controller which includes an ATS function to switch to another       load, in my case to a dump load especially when winds exceed the need. DUMP LOAD, what is it? Ideas on best build for a dump load. resistor bridge? DC water heater? Space heater converted to 24v? Would greatly appreciate a sketch of a resistor dump load.

4). 2-2400w 120a MPPT solar charge controllers attached to the separate banks of 10 each panels.

5). 16-3.2v 200ah LiFePO4 batteries separated in 2 banks 8 each in series for 25.6v 200ah ea, then both banks paralleled for 400ah total (math?)

6). PowerJacks 3000w autostart 24w lpg genset in case of maintenance, special circumstances or other failures occurring.

7). Automatic electric transfer box in case of inverter failure to switch to Meralco.

8). Lastly (maybe, there is a lot more learning curve involved with coding Arduino and Raspberry Pi) microcontrollers to monitor and report system aspect such as inverter temps battery temps and voltage system wide along with those items the lcd monitors on the PJ are monitoring.
These Stats will be relayed via dyndns.org to an app on my iphone or iPad as well as sms text alerts to my phone via a gsm module.
I also desire the microcontrollers to not just read stats but take action such as taking control of the cooling fan in the PJ (zap spiders Oz :0), maybe shut down a bank of batteries, switch to to the grid if absolutely necessary (i'm going for off-grid because electric credits do me no good if it's only $1.25 to have the service on standby, reset the inverter automatically for re-try after overload or undervolt etc.

all for now.

SN


SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline Pete

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2016, 02:02:01 am »
Hi Solar newbee, somewhere I saw that you were looking for a mud map of a delta connected load dump.
So here is one. If you put two of your 1 ohm resistors in parallel in each branch you will have a 0.5 ohms per phase.
If you go for three in each branch you will have 0.33 ohms per phase.
I guess you could start with one or two resistors in each branch and see how much braking it gives you. It is pretty easy to add more resistors in parallel if you need more braking.
Pete

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #2 on: January 29, 2017, 03:02:07 pm »
Hey Pete

My second Dump load, first one looks similar. 1 ohm resistors in delta. I built 2 in case I need to halve the resistance. tell me what you think.
SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #3 on: January 29, 2017, 03:34:44 pm »
Installed recently on vacation. Not running due to contractor failing me on panels install. I would do it but at 295 I'm too heavy to walk on a tile roof without breaking the tiles.
SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline Pete

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #4 on: February 01, 2017, 02:34:49 pm »
Hi Solar, looks fine, did you put heat transfer compound under the resistors?
I am thinking that you could have an arduino monitoring the output voltage of the wind turbine, if the wind is too strong and the voltage goes over a set point, then the second dump load could be switched in automatically.
The project looks great, certainly a large installation, you should not run out of power.

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #5 on: July 01, 2017, 03:52:08 pm »
Hi Pete,

Sorry for the late reply I have been super busy since I returned from the Philippines. The Windmill project will be completed when move there in about 2 years. I did put compound under the resistors, plenty. I Have the other dump load here in the US. There are 3 charge controllers that are for front and rear panels on the roof and for the windmill. The windmill charge controller has dual charging capabilities so when the batteries are full it will activate the contactors connecting the windmill dumploads. You have a good point there about switching on the second dump load at certain voltage levels. I have purchased an analog voltage sensor that reads up to 240 volts to give an analog output 0-5v. Still learning some coding, IDE and Python and using http://cayenne.mydevices.com as a way to use their icloud servers to monitor remotely from anywhere. The easiest to set up is the Rpi with no coding involved but I haven't had much luck with voltage monitoring which involves analog to digital devices. The MCP3008 have proved to be finicky so I have a serial ADS1115 converter on the way. Cayenne improves on their system in leaps and bounds. I have a dashboard set with widgets that monitors temps in the inverter and operate the cooling fan as I have noticed that the powerjack cooling setup seems iffy. I have coded an arduino that successfully monitors temps and voltages as a backup to the Rpi3. My goal is to use a the mega based PLCduino, the black box at top, as the backup but it doesn't seem to want to play nicely with the same code.

I recently delved into python script with the help of Cayenne tribe members and forums at Stackoverflow.com to remotely reset the Rpi from the arduino and vice versa from my Cayenne dashboard. Cayenne is free for personal use by the way and the Cayenne community is very helpful when anyone hits a wall. They are amazingly helpful to newbees like myself. There was one guy that got snarky and sarcastic but the booted him.

Thanks again,
Solarnewbee
SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #6 on: July 02, 2017, 07:20:37 pm »
Anyone interested in viewing my fledgling arduino/Rpi3 project dashboard the following links will allow it

https://cayenne.mydevices.com/shared/59598d2add9f5e4dd3b960de

https://cayenne.mydevices.com/shared/59598dc2dd9f5e4dd3b960df

SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #7 on: July 12, 2017, 07:28:28 pm »
Here's a sketch for the Mega PLCduino to control fans etc and monitor voltages. That's the black box in the pic above with the wifi antenna sticking out.

https://gist.github.com/wmontg5988/e0b098aef288b5a07f1ab756e6e30a61

SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #8 on: March 03, 2018, 07:33:11 pm »
Hey All!

I have purchased new mppt chargers that can handle 145v pv in. I would like to rectify 120vac to 120vdc for testing purposes with my new pj 2017 that has 2 main boards. Trying to put it thru it’s paces but blew out a power supply trying. I had planned on using a 40 amp bridge and big caps but not sure if that will fly.

Any thoughts!
SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline tinyt

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #9 on: March 03, 2018, 08:05:07 pm »
Hi Solarnewbee,

120vac is rms, if you diode bridge rectify it, the capacitor will be charged to the peak voltage of the rms. For sine wave it is 1.414 x Vrms = 1.414 x 120 = 169.7 vdc (less the drop on the diode bridge, maybe 2 volts). So it will exceed the mppt rating.

One way example only:
For 140vdc, you will need 99vac. If you have a step down transformer with isolated secondary of about 20 volts, you can connect the secondary in series but out of phase with the utility power lines, 120 - 20 = 100VAC. Make sure it is out of phase, else you will get 140vac. Also, be careful you are working with high voltage with practically unlimited power behind it.

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #10 on: March 04, 2018, 12:33:34 pm »
Thanks for the info TinyT,

I have a step down transformer I use for HVAC that steps down from 120, 208 or 240 to 24v. I have tried many configurations but get the same results. Any ideas where to head from here? You were definitely right about the voltage, as soon as I added caps the voltage jumped to from 122vac to 165vac.

Thanks
SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline tinyt

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #11 on: March 04, 2018, 01:18:01 pm »
See attached picture.

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #12 on: March 04, 2018, 04:48:21 pm »
Got it down to 146! The charger although doesn't seem to like that.
Would a high wattage 100r get it down to comfortable levels?, say around 125?

The 145v is the PV open circuit volts. PV array MPPT voltage range is 32-130v, so I will need to go lower.

maybe a voltage divider with 100w resistors. 22k x 3.9k = 124.015.

Watcha think?
SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps

Offline tinyt

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #13 on: March 04, 2018, 06:50:55 pm »
It might work. But maybe shoot for 130vdc (92vac) so change the 3.9k to 6.8k. You might need a fan to cool down the resistors.

Offline solarnewbee

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Re: y Philippines Retirement Solar Off Grid System
« Reply #14 on: March 11, 2018, 07:46:25 pm »
Hey tinyt,

Seems 100w 22k and many other values are not popular. I’m going for 6.9k x 6.9k for 73v. Since I’m using 36v 300w panels I am series them for 72v. I have a blown power supply that I put the high voltage dc supply in and it has a heat sink and fan. I had to put a 2 meg resistor across to drain the caps so I don’t get a bite. Got a screwdriver stuck to the leads taking a short cut ;D. If the system can’t keep up then maybe triple up for  108v. For now I’ve got 2 marine batteries and 2 1500w space heaters for testing.

Are you familiar with PJ inverters. My15kw has 2 power boards and one control board. Each has 2 smaller heat sinks with fets that are on the coil side and a large heat sink that the positive is connected to. If you had to label these, what would you label them. I have ds18b20 temp sensors on each heat sink that show on a dashboard to monitor temps and control the fan. I know Oz covered this somewhere and that thread is very long. Coil has one too.

Cheers!
SN

Any day above ground is a day for potential mishaps