photo #9312975

Question: Is your solar system under-producing or are *you* in fact under-consuming its power? I'm baking bread and the state of my solar system's batteries right now is Float. That means that they're fully charged. Look at the two screenshots of the solar charger's status. One represents the portion of time after the propane in my Amana gas stove is burning. One represents the portion of time when the electronic pilot mechanism is heating up that element in preparation of putting more propane in. The control mechanism is usually referred to as PID but we call this "bang on, bang off". The element uses about 500W to heat up during perhaps 20% of the oven's cycle. But note that the blue screens are from the supply side of my system. The solar system isn't asking for more sun when it needs it. The reality is that at least 30% of the day the system literally throws away power. For perhaps three hours per day in the summer if I'm not baking it's wasting at least 1.5kWh. It's quite possibly double that. If we're talking about grid power and the average cost of power in the states then that's less than fifty cents per day or roughly $180 per year. But I only have four solar panels. What about these installs in town with 36 panels? Those folks might be throwing away $2,000 per year by wasting the opportunity not consuming it. ---------- What if you sold a box to these owners which has a power cord, an ethernet cord and a USB cable to connect to their solar equipment? The purpose of the box would be to mine cryptocurrency for only three hours per day. It would consume waste solar power and generate a small income in cryptocurrency. Alternately the box could bring up one or more servers which could be used as a distributed platform for performing distributed computer tasks across the country.