Here’s a reasonably representative photo.

No. Also, I apologize for being a bit rude, but what would you gain from having a video of a home wind generator working? There’s probably thousands of such videos on the Internet.

The question is too vague to answer well, but I have run a high autonomy household for 10 years, so it’s possible. Solar with battery storage, small wind generator to supplement things during storms. Heating uses wood.

Latitude 59, so I get an electrical energy crisis every winter, but on most winters, I don’t have to start a gasoline generator or bring electricity over with my e-car.

If you’re on a lower latitude, it becomes simpler, if you only have enough surface for solar panels.

Some types of solar charge controllers and battery managers have the capability to start a generator.

Steps:

1. charge controller: raises or lowers GPIO pin (3.3 or 5 V, current: a few milliamps)
2. relay board (needs 5V power): amplifies the GPIO signal and actuates a small relay
3. small relay: switches 12V power to actuate the starter relay (current: maybe 1 amp)
4. starter relay: powers the starter motor (12V, 10+ amps)

In an ideal world, your generator is well designed and already contains the starter relay, and the charge controller has a relay board, so you get to skip steps 1, 2 and 4 and just run a “start signal wire” between the two units.

Now, after getting your generator started, what you care about is load. The maker of the generator should have published a chart of efficiency vs. load. Too little load, and you’re wasting energy to overcome mechanical drag. Better stop the generator. Too much load, and you’re reducing the lifetime of your generator and risking accidents. Better reduce charging current.

Regarding UPS: a typical UPS comes with a lead acid battery that is not intended to be deep discharged repeatedly. If you end up doing that, expect dramatically reduced battery lifetimes.

If you’re new to electric circuits, your safest bet is probably an industrially produced LiFePO4 battery bank with balancing, alarm and emergency disconnect circuits built in.

However, if you have a manually startable generator, you better just get a big battery pack and find out what the optimal load for your generator is (note: might depend on temperature and cooling). You would want to start the generator rarely.

P.S.

If you can’t find a suitable product combination, this functionality can be DIY-ed with a Raspberry Pi, analog digital converter, voltage divider and cheap Chinese relays. But then it requires some electronics skills.

Sadly, I don’t know of any books on the subject. The only article I’ve read is this one:

https://tinyshinyhome.com/hyperadobe-earthbag-solar-shed-office-tour

Your intake of solar is quite low

I have other solar arrays besides the fence. Two diagonal arrays and one shed roof (which covers with snow in winter). All together they can currently give 4.5 kW. But this never happens in winter, of course.

If you cool something considerably below room temperature (specifically, the “dew point” at the air moisture level that you have), condensation will happen for sure.

I use my heat pump for cooling in summer. The indoor unit keeps dripping condensation water through a small hose into the big water tank.

This one looks neat, but I think I can propose a better one. :) It could be a tower, externally black in color, with the south-facing side transparent or windowed. The interior under the window should also be painted black. Instead of one rack, multiple racks of food could be installed.

Why?

• a tower develops ascending airflow, while a horizontal box does not, this helps ensure that moisture does not re-condense but leaves

• with a tower system, you can also dry foods that would degrade from sunlight (gather energy at the bottom and deliver it to a closed top part)

I even built one and used it to dry kale chips, but it was too tall - wind kept pushing it over.

I have batteries and a stand-alone inverter. Currently, there is no grid connection, the power company is still working on getting a cable here.

My batteries are not a shiny example of how to do things - poorly installed and pretty dangerous right now (batteries should not be indoors) so I’m building a battery box outside the house for them. (Of course, already now they have redundant balancers and a battery alarm.)

Currently, my battery capacity is quite low: about 10 kWh. I plan to expand that to 18 kWh.

Currently, they suffice to run the heat pump for half a day.

Often times, I operate with a partial energy balance: e.g. panels currently produce 700 W, heat pump requires 1200 W (this seems to change with outdoor temperature), I take the difference from batteries.

But in mid-winter, I use a wood-fired stove.

Also, when it’s warm enough indoors, but I feel that I need to store heat for subsequent days, I have a pool heat pump converted (more like hacked) to heat a 1 ton water tank. It circulates a solution of car windshield washing liquid (ethanol based) through a system of hoses and a long copper coil in the water tank. It draws about 600 W and make no immediate difference to room temperature.

Nice system. The first drain and spillway are well thought out.

Not sure about elsewhere, but here in Europe, one can often get plastic IBC containers in a metal support cage (1 x 1 x 1 m cube shaped) really cheap. It’s smart to examine the labels before buying, to make sure it didn’t hold anything hazardous. They come with a tap too and store 1000 L of water.

So if one practises gardening, a bigger tank might be handy to have. Elevating the ground under the tank or digging a hole under the tap will ensure better access.

Moderator here: “slrpnk.net” has an instance wide “constructive discussion” rule, so I removed two comments.

Ethanol is among the few substances which practically doesn’t burn into CO. It is extremely hard to poison oneself with an ethanol burner.

However, according to an article linked below, burning large amounts of ethanol in a confined space (their experimental space was 48 cubic meters, which would be comparable to a small cabin) can exceed reasonable limits for CO2, nitrogen dioxide and benzene. Sadly, their article summary does not provide the quantity of ethanol that they burned. It is an important parameter of the process.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140903091728.htm

Now it’s also loading for me. Thanks for trying. :)

Strange, I can’t get the link to open. If I just click the link, (Firefox on Linux) it says “SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT”. However, when I revert to http:// instead of https://, it loads a page saying:

Invalid url! /t/K2Wj4

Can anyone else tell - does it open for you?

That was a long story, and I was a fool.

I bought a car that had driven an incredibly short mileage, hoping to restore the battery to working order. Being unfamiliar with it, I was unable to find the fault at first, so I bought a second-hand battery separately to test the car. I found the problem, fixed the car, but now had a batttery with a few dead cells left over. After fruitless attempts to find another person in need of many cells, I decided to use them for my house. :)

That’s quite understandable.

On related notes, my first disassembly of an EV battery pack was very slow and careful, and the surface, boots, gloves and tools really carefully considered. Of course, EV batteries have those safety jumpers which split the pack in two, but even the halves are dangerous enough to worry.

Indeed, I have nothing here that would draw 35 kilowatts. :) If I weld, the maximum is 4 kW, if I charge my car, the maximum is about 3.6 kW. By the way, I’ve observed that most of time, the MIEV cruises at around 10 kW - accelerating is a whole different matter of course. :) If I get a bit more, I’ll be happy, but I don’t expect a lot more.

I have no power grid here. Maybe next autumn, but I only asked them to build a laughably small connection of 3 x 6 A, to act as a backup in case my systems are catastrophically broken) so no grid tie. Since it’s a really curious location (no official road either) I wonder if the grid operator actually manages to build it in one year. :)

As for inverters, my setup isn’t new or shiny - there’s a legacy DC-AC (poor choice of brand name from some Taiwanese maker, even I can’t find their website because their name is so generic) 24 V 5 KW inverter. It produces modified sine wave, was too expensive, and the first one that I got developed a fault and was replaced. The replacement has been running my house for the past 5 years. It will retire when I manage to move over to a 48V system voltage.

…and its replacement is a somewhat newer Maximum Solar PIP-4048MS (no longer produced, but they make similar ones). It’s actually less powerful (only 4 kW) but produces a pure sine wave and I bought it used for a really good price.

Although the new(er) inverter can act as a charger (drawing power either from solar or a generator or a power grid) and likely it soon will, I have 3 separate chargers, each for a different panel array. All of them are Maximum Solar PCM60X. I mostly chose them because they have passive cooling and they’ve been working for several years.

They are supposed to have a capacity of 37.5 amp-hours left and I’ll have four stacks in parallel, so I’ll have around 150 amp-hours.

If I multiply that by the average voltage under load (16 cells per stack x 3.85 volts per cell = 60 V, but I might have to compromise and go for 15 cells per stack), I get 150 x 60 = 9000 Wh = 9 kWh. A factory-fresh battery of this sort has a dozen more cells and is supposed to hold 16 kilowatt-hours. Since I drive one of those cars, I know from experience that 9 kWh is a realistic estimate, but I’ll find out the true capacity later.

Thanks, I’ll try to find a description of it. :)

About using 2 chains: yep, I’ve thought about it. Attachment points would be at the outer ends of the first (smalller) bar of the A-shaped plow. Haven’t tried it yet, but will.

Interesting idea. :) What kind of a mattress do they use for leveling roads?

The current plow has many problems:

• it is imprecise, unless the pulling chain is short
• regardless of the chain length, it “wags its tail” when encountering resistance (this can be a plus if the car isn’t powereful, though)
• it is shallow and weighs less than conventional road plows (can be a plus because I need to carry it without pulling muscles or joints)
• it has the simplest geometry, a triangle

Generally, a snow plow does level the road also - but only a little because the ground is frozen and everything is slippery. When I look at my plow after working, the steel of the downward edge shines - it has worked hard against the ground.

It’s a poor solution, but better than nothing. The plowing profiles are welded with the L pointing forward and down (to ensure rising on top of snow), the holding profiles can be welded any way. They are at 1/3 of length and 2/3 of length respectively.

P.S.

A note: if one has automatic transmission, or continuously variable transmission, one should not pull things.

With manual gearboxes, fixed reductors and direct drive, it’s OK. The car is indeed blurred for privacy. :)