The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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Pure electric Nissan Leaf 2017 Black Edition (It's white), cameras all round for parking, but it does have a rubbish satnav built in - they want to charge £90 each year to update it - and charge points are way out-of-date.
Says it can do 144 miles, but that's a bit optimistic and you have to drive slow.
There's a app for charge points in UK and the whole of Ireland - zapmap.
It cleverly helps you plan out stops on longer trips. So, when I went up to London a couple of weeks ago, I had to stop twice to top up the charge. I could maybe have done it in one go, but I would have arrived empty (if I was lucky!).
In any case, I have the dog, so I would have stopped once at least, anyway, to give him a walk.
The fast chargers I use on such a trip take half an hour to give me 70% charge. It's hardly enough time to walk him! So a 174 mile 3 hour 40 minute (plus at least one stop for the dog) journey takes a little longer.
As of today, when I charge at home, I'll get about 50 miles range for a pound. Full charge overnight, with no trouble.
TMI?

I'm getting a (non-TeslaPowerWall) PowerVault fitted soon. Only 10kWH, so it can't charge the car (much), as the car has a 30kWH battery. However, the solar panels can charge the PowerVault during the day, I can then use some of that to charge the car, and it should cover my electricity needs as well. I'm vaguely expecting a zero energy bill from now on. (Except in the depths of winter!)

Ooops. The battery I'm getting for the house is merely 8.2kWh. I dunno where I got the 10kWh figure from.

Anyway, to get that amount of stored energy with lead/acid leisure batteries would take eighty of them, and cost treble what I'm paying. I've just looked at the cost of an equivalent Tesla Powerwall... and it's rather more than I'll be paying.

I already have eleven 240w solar panels. They haven't been doing too well today - it was pretty cloudy.

Oh. And all my lighting is now LED.

Ok ok .. am dummy , looked up powervault on net found it, sorry to trouble you lau.

Nice posts

I try to be informative... when I'm not being plain weird.

That all sounds good!

Depending on the site you put your panels on, you might be surprised at how much you can generate in winter. While we don't own our place right now, when I do buy a home I will definitely have solar installed. And possibly, if we're rural enough, a small wind turbine. (We tend to use under 300kw a day at the very most, and usually only about 2/3rd of that, so that should work fine for us, someday.) But your generation should increase as the sun shifts in the sky in spring and summer, and since solar panels last, what, 25 years?, you'll eventually earn back the installation costs and then have "free" energy for the remainder of their life. And you're not creating any carbon emissions getting whatever energy you do get out of them. So it's a win-win. Will your local power grid buy back excess energy from you?

The Leaf sounds interesting. I'm not sure that is doable in the USA unless one is in a city and doesn't drive a lot (some of the places I've lived I used to drive 65 miles each way to work) but it is definitely encouraging to know that the technology is improving so rapidly. Hopefully by the time I buy another car it'll be doable. Thanks for all the info!

The panels on this house (11*240W=2.64kW) cost £9650, back at the end of 2011. They were supposed to break even after nine years. They actually broke even a year or so ago.

It's cloudy and 15 Celsius here. At this instant (now they've fitted the smart meters) I'm feeding 150W into our national grid. Admittedly, I've only got this desktop computer running and some stuff on standby, but the panels are only producing 240W (cloudy and not very cold = 10%, and knock off another percent because they are eight years old and slightly grubby!). When the sun comes out (only the once, this next week, at 4pm on Sunday!), I'll have a look to see what the panels are producing.

So... this is my typical daytime - the panels produce enough power to run my computers an boil a kettle occasionally (once the house battery gets installed, hopefully next week).

PS. Please note that, in earlier posts, I had been specifying units as "kWH". These would be "kilo Watt Henry". So, rather than energy, they would be (kg^2⋅m^4)/(s^5⋅A^2), which isn't really anything. I have also used "w" (a non-existent unit) instead of "W". I'd go back and correct them all, but I guess the time limit on editing posts is tiny now?

PPS. I keep looking at the "Tesla model S performance". Tesla have put in charge points all over the world, where you get free unlimited electricity:

• 0-60 mph 2.4 sec
• Top Speed 162 mph
• range 365 mi
• price £89,890

Love this topic . Love info. Ty , am going to hope my wet cells are up to some demands , against a inverter , cold cranking hours what not, versus , surge draw . Am hoping to initially just try to support various .low amp draw 12 volt , 5 volt Dc applications . , batteries ,, might look at australias Red cell z wave batteries . Little pricey , but claims are impressive .
My system is based on some very old 14 volt in direct sunlight output . But as written before ,area only has solid sunlight in areas for panels, for approx 5 hours . Old aerospace panels. No amp output tested yet. And , am pretty sure 5000 watt inverter will suck wet cells dead in 1/2 hour probably . But am owning 300 watt also .. long term , am living in area requiring air conditioning , health requirements too .. big squirrel cage blower . Am , considering test out home made. Air con. unit as a by pass in the air ducting. ( Unit automotive condenser unit, aluminium . Finned high density ), running ice water through it . Or water and glycerin . Pumped through a portable auto motive refrigerator. 12 volt.
Possibly the squirrel cage motor maybe 12 volt car starter unit. My goal is to reduce inverter usauge as much as possible as system expands . Was hoping to use multiple peltier panels . But amp draw is not as good as hoped . Thank You for your patience with my going on about this.
And yes am soliciting criticisms ?? Please
(Considered multiple bottles of jack daniels for coolant, but temptation too strong)

Could you fit some concrete brick storage in your back yard?

EnergyVault.com claim 90% round trip efficiency.

I suppose, if you had a disused missile silo, you could fit a small rig inside it.