• sga@lemmings.worldM
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    1 day ago

    our peak summers reach 55-60 °C, but in uk’s case, they have additional issuee of being very humid, in whuich case, the percieved temperature is much higher.

    Where i live, we have both options for solar, that is either to use batteries, or int the days, we directly use solar, and send excess back to grid, and consume from grid during nights. This is kinda battery less (you still need some smaller batteries to get consistent power rates, but batter pak size would be smaller.

    When my wife and I built our house and sorted our (fucking massive) solar system our consultant said "Smart appliances are your best friend. Load the washer and dryer, set them to turn on at 10am before you leave the house. Set the airconditioning to come on at about 3 in the afternoon so that you not only get home to the AC/Heat but your using energy that would otherwise go back to the grid and then once the sun goes down you’re only maintaining temp which is way less energy intensive. Home batteries are still just not cost effective enough yet for us to justify one.

    that just seems to be a lot of power being wasted. but i can understand your point regarding batteries. We mostly use “dumb” appliances (read not iot devices) and mostly just control manually.

    I on the other hand am actually not a huge solar fan, but mostly because we are running out of resources, good quality silicon, silver and other value metals, and cost of solar wwould actually start rising. I am more of a nuclear fan, but i undeerstand, that smaller nuclear reactors are still a thing of future, and I also kinda get why people do not like centrralised large reactors. To me, that is still the most efficient way to generate power.

    • Delphia@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Its not “wasted” financially. I dont know the rates but if 1 unit costs 50c from the grid during the day they will only pay me 10c to feed into the grid, at peak times (evenings) they want $1 from the grid and I cant contribute. If I preheat/cool my house with 5 units of energy I would have only gotten $.50 for and halve my evening usage on maintaining it from say 10 to 5 im up by $4.50

      The numbers are bullshit, but you get the idea.

      Also down the track a little my wife and I are looking at making one of our cars a phev so we wanted to be able to charge it at home off solar.