Power begins with spinning on an axis.
The world (solar power) and the water turbine is how we roll at Snowslide Gulch.
Anyway you look at DIY power, batteries are always super important. The batteries regulate the flow of electricity so that despite any lulls or spikes from the power source(s) (flooding, drought, sun, or clouds) or the high or low amount of power we consume from minute-to-minute (lights, the fridge turning on and off, the microwave starting) making up the difference and protects all the things we use from the surges.
A peek inside our 'battery shack'.
The inverters are mounted on the wall and
We have 2 banks of batteries (total = 24) in the back room.
With that in mind, consider the destruction of batteries!
Batteries are very expensive so when the water needs to be checked (every 4 months or so) I check it and top it off. By looking, it is really obvious when the water is low but we have only just bothered to find out that the perfect fill-depth is between 1/4" and 1/2" from the top. It's a real pain in the butt when you know the right way to do something then find out it isn't. At all.
Check out the green arrow (good) and the orange arrow (nasty corroded electrode hovering over where the caulking has been eaten away).
The result of believing that it should be filled to barely below the fill hole? It eats the silicone calking around the terminals. Arrrrgh! To get the batteries fixed they need to be taken completely apart!
On the brighter side... ... The batteries' expected life-span is 10 years. We've had ours for 14 and they've been working beautifully. There are only 4 batteries showing damage and I'll need to look after them more carefully to make sure they don't evaporate dry but they (and I) are not irredeemable. This time.
We looked into a grid-tie solar system, but I just couldn't justify the expense. Being entirely off-grid makes it a no-brainer for you. Have you ever heard of the Edision-cell battery? They are a good option for stationary, long-life applications. The design in so robust that some of Edison's originals are still working. Last time I checked there were a few manufacturers who were making them.
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I personally didn't look into the type of battery that my husband chose but he tends to do a lot of research before investing so heavily in something we have to rely on. He says he doesn't remember seeing them in particular but there are a couple reasons he might have seen them and decided against them. One may have been the expense which has increase from hundreds of times to maybe thousands of times greater than that at which they were first sold. Each of the batteries we chose (14 years ago) cost over $400 then multiply by 24. Even at that price they were deeply discounted.
Doug is also pretty cautious about the research because so many batteries over the years have been banned due to catastrophic failures without any definitive findings for why they blew up/caught on fire/etc. He wanted some that were widely used (more of a pool to draw on) without having to have a lot of maintenance or a problematic failure rate.
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Fourteen years is pretty good for these batteries. I will be interested to see how long they will last...
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Me too! 😉
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No prob. I appreciate what you do to encourage us minnows! I'm just not interested in having generic replies to my posts. I'm a bit of a party pooper in my real life. 😉
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