As some of you may be aware, Chrissy and I have run a fully sustainable home for about 15 years now in Jerrabomberra, N.S.W. Part of the original design was that we would be totally based on electricity as the energy source in the home, no gas on these premises!
As a result, there have been quite a few phases of solar panel deployment – ending up with basically 5kW’s of panels running through a Solar Edge SE5000 inverter with full grid monitoring. While the NSW Solar Bonus Scheme has been operating, this has been more than enough in the house to mean that we have not had to pay for any electricity bills for 5 years – and indeed the excess has paid the Rates as well.
However! The Solar Bonus Scheme wound up on December 31st, 2016, and even before then I was ‘out and about’ trying to find a solution for our home that made economic sense and that, as much as possible, included Australian products in the best solution possible.
With the help of the wonderful Glen Morris of SolarQuip and ASC (solarquip.com.au) I was able to begin to see a solution. By invitation from Glen, I attended a four day training course in October 2016 at his base in Moora Moora in Victoria (just outside Melbourne) which gave me a great deal of useful, current information about battery storage and off grid installations. From that training I realised that the majority of my solutions COULD be Australian made products.
So this news item is to announce that as of mid-May, 2017, we will be instituting the next phase of solar energy generation and storage at our home in Jerrabomberra. I intend to keep everyone that is interested ‘in the loop’ by updating the ecofootprints.com.au website frequently with photos of the work in progress.
Who will do the work? SSE Systems and Tobias McLenaghan (accounts@ssesystems.com.au) and that will be collaboration across a range of different electrical systems for the property.
What will we install? The battery will be a Redflow ZBM2 (www.redflow.com) , the MMI (Multi Mode Inverter) will be a Selectronic SPMC481-AU (www.selectronic.com.au) and the system will incorporate both a Reposit box (www.repositpower.com) and a CatchPower device (www.catchpower.com.au) for even better capture of Solar Hot Water than we have already. ALL of these devices have built in, ‘live-time’ internet monitoring so after the installation process I look forward to keeping you all up-to-date with how the different efficiencies co-ordinate and what sort of performance we get out of each part of the new system.
Exciting times ahead!