Who all here is growing in a solar powered grow room? Just want to see the set ups.
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I think you may be the only one
(And your setup is awesome)
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Out of all the people here, all the brains and ingenuity, I find that hard to accept 
Thanks for the kind words 
Have I somehow become a trail blazer? LOL
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My room is solar powered if by room you mean outside and by solar powered you mean the sun 
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LMAO, they change definitions everyday, so why not 
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My whole home is powered by solar, including the grow room. Sorry though, nobody’s gonna see it. Still dealing with rather Draconian laws here, so I’m not showing any pictures of the outside of my home. It’s not DIY anyway, so not nearly as interesting as yours. I wrote a check, and then I had solar.
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I was more interested on the inside stuff, not the panels…haha. But, happy to see someone else is doing it 
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As far as the inside, it looks pretty much exactly the same as it did before the solar was installed, so that’s pretty boring too… on the technical side of it, I suppose I’m not actually using solar energy to power my grow room or anything in the home, because the state has incentive programs based on net metering. The panels generate the electricity and it goes back to the grid, and then I use power normally and the amount I’ve generated is subtracted from my monthly bills, with excess carried over to the next month.
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Ah, you are using net metering, not off grid.
Hope the do not change the rules on you in the near future!
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I was under the impression that what you produce is sold to the grid. Perhaps it’s different in different places? I really don’t know
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Any excess you produce, is sold to the grid. It’s like banking credits if your system can produce enough.
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Once they stop paying me to be on grid and there are decent batteries available more cheaply - which seems to be getting better every year - I’m gone. The incentive program has already been changed but I’m grandfathered in until ~2040. If the net metering changes, I dunno what I’d do, but since there hasn’t been even a whisper of that happening or what they’d change it to… probably a non-issue.
It’s different in different places, yep. Some states don’t do net metering at all, some do it on a monthly basis and the excess each month is sold to the grid (at wholesale price, roughly 20% of what we pay), and some do it on a yearly basis with the excess only sold off at the end of the year. My state is actually one of the better ones as far as net metering rules, since it’s yearly and also allows you to choose when that year starts for more flexibility.
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If I were to get a check instead of a bill from the power company I’d probably laugh my ass off for 3 weeks about it.
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if you can find a place that has used forklift batteries you can recycle them yourself cheap as hell. you have to be careful though, it deals with acid and crap. proper precautions, a well ventilated area, and keeping it away from kids and you should be alright. the waste disposal may be a hassle too though, but you only have to do that once every five years or so. i’m gonna try it when i get my camper and make it solar this year. can’t wait to see how it goes compared to just buying new ones.
another trick i heard about to make it more efficient is to convert as much as you can to dc. things like computers, tvs, and most electronics use dc, not ac. it’s all good when you buy it, but it loses a little every time it’s converted. when you produce it yourself, you lose some when converting to ac, then a little more when converting back to dc to use it. it’s not a lot but i haven’t ran the numbers. and of course you can’t just plug things in anywhere when you do it this way.
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IfLA are the way to build big power storage, cheap. Easy to refurb yourself, can be bought for scrap price, and proven to last decades in solar set ups. They truly are the king of solar.
Going 12v doesn’t make sense, all.the 12v appliances are very inefficient, and you don’t want to be running your home on 12v. The Amp draw would be absolutely horrendous., unless you dont actually use anything in your home.
At 12v, my wife’s oven would be pulling almost 600amps alone. Think about that…lol
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Still gonna be on the grid for another decade+ so I won’t be doing anything yet… this tracks with the little bit of research I did when I was putting it in, before I realized that I’d be screwing myself out of $30-40k by going off grid too soon. Once I realized that, I stopped researching because it might all have changed by then anyway. Or possibly nothing will have changed, other than people being more certain that Elon’s talking out his ass. 
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Batteries where the largest hurdle to over come, no doubt about that. And most just don’t realize how much you need, to run an all electric home. And Tha was key to me, why have solar, off grid, and have to rely on some gas? That made absolutely no sense to me. So, I knew I had to go pretty big to be able to do this. And batteries had been the hindering factor, until I researched what they used back in the 70 and 80s. And then, like a ton of bricks, some where still working…and everyone of them, was IFLA. So, that started me down my rabbit hole…haha
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i’m not talking about going completely dc, just the things that don’t use ac normally like electronics. anything that heats or cools needs ac. you can make the tv, computers, clocks, and even most led lights work off of dc with minor modifications, more for the lights. like i said i haven’t ran the numbers so the savings may not be worth it. i’m gonna do it with my camper even if it’s not cost effective because i won’t be moving anything much anyway. it just seems to me that converting dc to ac just to convert it back to dc before using it is wasting a a step. unless you have a long way to move it, then it makes sense, but not for solar at the house already.
It is converted from DC to AC!
I understand what you are saying. I just was not willing to give up my normal way of life to go solar. And really, the only hindering factor was the cost of batteries. Once that was over come, it wasn’t a question of how we need to cut back, or conserve. It just became a matter of more cells and panels.
Really, I am running an entire electric home, and grow room. We did not cut back, or conserve our use. My wife has 3 confection ovens, electric dryer, etc. The only thing I make sure of is, don’t pre heat all the ovens at once. And it takes some serious battery power to do that. And you are right, DC to ac to DC is inefficient as hell, but it’s far easier to overcome that, than rewire everything to be DC.
What would be a far better approach, IMO, would to take that knowledge, that 95% of everything hs its own power supply, and are actually DC. So, what does that really mean? It means that everything you hear about needing a pure sine wave inverter, as hogwash. Your damn modified sine inverter, did not kill your laptop. Separate items, anything that would be an induction load, or ac motor, and resistance loads should be pure sine. So, modified sine on 95% of your house for pennies, and a small pure sine on what actually needs it.
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