This is not yet a BP, but a test of nerves and an approach to organizing life. When I was building the house, I counted on the fact that for some time the conveniences familiar to the inhabitants of any city might be absent: water, electricity, heat, communications. Therefore, my approach was based on the reservation of all critical systems:
Water: own well, but there is a well to collect water with a bucket if the pump fails or the power grid fails
Heat: Heat-intensive screed that heats up with warm water floors and loses up to 3-4 degrees per day at -20 outside the window. That is, before freezing, in the absence of an external electrical network, there are 2-3 days to put into operation a backup heating system (gas boiler powered by bottled gas).
Electricity:In addition to the standard supplied 15 kW (3 phases), there is an own solar power station with a capacity of 6 kW, an energy reserve in the battery of up to 6.5 kW * h (70% of the battery discharge) and 2.5 kW solar panels. Practice has shown that in the summer, due to working on the battery in the evening and night and recharging from the sun during the day, you can live independently for almost unlimited time with some reservations, which I will discuss below. In addition, there is a backup generator, if the external network will be absent for a long time and it will be cloudy for several days - then it is enough to start the generator and recharge the battery.
Internet: A mobile router with a directional antenna and SIM cards of the two fastest mobile operators
I want to dwell in more detail on solar energy and access to the network, since they are especially in demand and technologically advanced.
Solar power plant
Over the past time, I have dug up information on solar energy production by month. The graphs clearly show how with the advent of autumn and a decrease in daylight, the overall production decreases. In winter, there is practically no sun or it is so low to the horizon that the crumbs of energy that can be collected using solar panels are enough to maintain the minimum operation of electrical appliances.
I am very often asked a question about heating with electricity generated from solar panels. Just look at the December production figures for the whole month and estimate how many hours of operation of one electric heater this energy will be enough! Let me remind you that the average consumption of an oil cooler is 1.5 kW.
I also collected very interesting statistics on the consumption of electrical appliances in one cycle:
• Washing machine - 1.2 kW * h
• Bread oven - 0.7 kW * h
• Dishwasher - 1 kW * h
• Boiler 100l - 5.8 kW * h
It is immediately clear that most of the energy is spent on heating the water, and not on the operation of pumps or motors. Therefore, I abandoned the electric kettle and the electric stove, which, although it boils water quite quickly, wastes precious electricity on it, which may not be enough to operate other vital systems. At the same time, my stove and oven are gas-fired and will work even if all the electronics are completely out of order.
I will also give statistics on energy generation by days for June 2020.
Taking into account the fact that in the Russian Federation it is not yet possible for individuals to sell the generated RES energy to the grid, it must be disposed of independently, otherwise it "disappears". My network inverter is configured in such a way that the energy of the sun is used primarily for the operation of home appliances, and then the energy from the network. But if the house consumes 300-500 watts, when the clear sky and the sun are frying, then be at least how many panels, and there is nowhere to put energy. From here I deduced several rules that apply to all households where there is a solar power station:
• A washing machine, dishwasher, and bread maker are included in the fennel and peak of daily output in order to maximize the use of energy received from the sun.
• An electric boiler heats water from 11 pm to 7 am at the night rate, and then from 11 am to 6 pm when the sun is above the panels. At the same time, the water does not have time to cool down completely, unless several people bathe in a row between 18 and 23 hours. In this case, the boiler is switched on manually.
• I use electric lawn mower and trimmer: firstly, electric motors are much easier to operate, do not require fuel and lubricants and such careful maintenance as gasoline ones. Secondly, they are quieter. Thirdly, the cost of one good extension cord is equal to a can of gasoline and a bottle of oil, and this extension cord will work much longer. Fourth, the operation of electric mowers on a sunny day is free for me.
That is, all energy-intensive work has been postponed to the daytime, when there is a lot of sun. Sometimes washing can be postponed for a day, if it is not critical, for the sake of clear weather.
The load during the day can be seen in the following graph. Here you can see how at 11 o’clock the boiler turned on and he finished heating the water at around 12 o’clock, then other electrical appliances turned on. After 13 hours, an electric lawn mower was used when the output from the solar panels jumped sharply. If the excess energy could be sold, then the production schedule would be flat, and the surplus would simply flow into the network, where it would be consumed by my neighbors.
Thus, for 11 months, including cloudy autumn and winter, my solar power plant generated 1.2 megawatt * hours of energy, which I got absolutely free.
The result of operation: TopRay Solar single-crystal panels did not lose their efficiency over the year, as the output jumps even for the declared 2520 W (9 panels of 280 W each) with an optimal installation angle. It is possible to live with the help of a solar power plant completely autonomously in the summer, and economically in spring and autumn, if you give up an electric stove and an electric kettle. It is impossible to heat with electricity from solar panels. But in the summer, the air conditioner works perfectly only due to the generated energy.
Internet access
Last June I tested the Tandem-4GR router from the Russian company Microdrive. It has proven itself so well that I even installed one copy in my car and it still provides me with network access while traveling. But at home, I put a parabolic mesh antenna, which has a minimum windage, and connected it to the second same router. But I was tormented by the thought of the need to reserve, because if the money on the balance runs out, the operator's tower breaks down, or his communication channel falls off, then I will also be left without access to the network. By the way, this is exactly what happened during an autumn thunderstorm, when the connection disappeared for 4 hours.
At the beginning of this year, the same company rolled out a device with support for two SIM cards to the market and I could not pass by. I even released a review of this router, which turned out to be just fantastically tenacious and easy to use. I mounted it on the antenna bracket and now I have not only the minimum distance from the emitter to the router, that is, I do not lose the signal on long wires, but I also have a reserved channel for two different providers.
The router periodically pings the specified hosts and, if there is no response, switches to another SIM card. For the user, this goes completely unnoticed and this is a really useful feature. I was also lucky that the towers are located approximately on the same line, since the "beam" of such an antenna is very narrow and the probability of getting a good signal from two operators at once is not very high. But I solved a similar problem with a friend by using a panel antenna, the directional diagram of which is noticeably wider. As a result, both operators work, but the main sim card is the one where the operator gives more speed.
After installing this router, I forgot about the need to do anything with my network and now I only regret that the router supports LTE Cat.4 and has a 100 Mbps interface, preventing the download of files even faster. Although one of the operators in my set of SIM cards supports channel aggregation and is able to give the speed higher, but here I run into the speed of a 100-megabit interface. Microdrive is very eager to respond to the wishes of users and promises to release a router with LTE Cat.6 support and a gigabit interface this year, which means it will be possible to have such a speed that the wired provider is simply left behind. There is only one minus of the mobile Internet - the response time is much higher than that of the wireline operators, but this is critical only for avid gamers, where the difference between 5 and 40 ms is noticeable.Other users will appreciate the possibility of free movement.
Bottom line: two SIM cards are always better than one, and mobile operators are much quicker to fix problems on the line than wired Internet operators. Already, routers with LTE Cat.4 support can compete in the price of monthly network access with wired providers, and with the advent of a router with LTE Cat.6 support, the difference in network access speed will be leveled and only a difference in response of several tens of milliseconds will remain, which are critical only for gamers.
Conclusion
All the ideas laid down in the design of the house paid off. Warm water floors provide excellent heat and inertness. When I heat them with an electric boiler at the night rate, and during the day the floors slowly give off heat - enough without heating at temperatures down to -15 outside. If the temperature is lower, then you have to turn on the boiler for several hours during the day.
Once the well froze when it was -28 outside, but the well was not useful. I laid a heating self-regulating cable along the pipe from the well to the entrance to the house and this solved the problem. It was necessary to do this immediately in the summer. Now my heating line turns on at night, if the street temperature is below -15 degrees. During the day, there is no need to turn it on, since the analysis of water is sufficient to defrost the ice that occurs during downtime.
A solar power plant often operates in UPS mode for the whole house, since in the private sector outside the city, shutdowns from half an hour to 8 hours are a common thing. This year the power engineers tried their best and from January to March there were no accidents, but with the onset of April, repair work began along the entire length of the lines and power outages became permanent. The second function of the solar power plant is the generation of its own energy: the first megawatt * hour of its own energy produced occurred in 10.5 months, including autumn and winter. And if it were possible to sell the surplus generation to the grid, the first megawatt would have been produced much earlier.
As for the mobile Internet, it is already safe to say that in terms of speed it has come close to the twisted pair cable, which draws most providers into apartments, and in terms of reliability even higher. This is noticeable by how quickly wire providers and mobile operators restore communications. For opsos, even if one tower "falls", the router switches to another and the connection is restored. And if the operator stops working altogether, then the two-SIM router simply switches to another operator and this happens unnoticed by users.
The pandemic and everything connected with it demonstrated that living in your home is much safer and more free: no passes to walk around the site, no neighbors with hyperactive children who will ride around the house, normal communication and the possibility of remote work, as well as reserved systems life supports make life very attractive.
And now I am ready to answer your questions.