Notes From the Ultimate Renewable Energy Do-It-Yourselfer

My friend and frequent guest blogger Brian McGowan writes:

Sorry I haven’t written any posts lately. I am in the middle of several projects around the house now, one of which is a low voltage disconnect and dump load controller for my little alternate energy arrangement here. The one thing I have found lacking in off-grid equipment is that there is no way to control the diversion of power to other loads once the batteries have been charged. The common way to do it now is for charge controller manufacturers to simply choke the panels down so the batteries don’t get over charged. Of course this means that the PV array is now not producing at peak capacity anymore and so power is being wasted.

In my case power can be wasted for as much as five hours a day. I think the charge controllers should be in charge of diverting this power since they know the state of the battery charge but the manufacturers of these devices are not interested in having anything to do with this. I also think they should be in charge of shutting off loads when the battery voltage gets too low since, again, they have intimate knowledge of the state of the batteries. They are also not interested in this.

I think there should be one brain controlling all of this. If they won’t let it be their brain I guess I will have to make my own brain.  For what it’s worth, I would dump power into a hydrogen generator and use that hydrogen to feed Glenn Doty’s (Windfuels — synthetic fuels) process if he would get a small prototype going that I could take advantage of.

Other projects include rebuilding my solar air heater, and maybe making another one and getting my hands on a diesel VW to put a vegetable oil kit on. Nobody wants to let go of one of these VWs once they get their hands on one. It’s like finding hens’ teeth.  Anyway, just letting you know where I am.  Hope you are doing well.

Thanks for the update.  Two comments:

• I would have thought that the concept of net metering implied the existence of the “brains” you’re talking about, i.e., automatically routing excess power onto the grid.

• I have a VW diesel myself, and, when I bought it, I asked the dealer about vegetable oil.  Have you ever seen a large, over-hungry dog choke on its food?  He was visibly stunned that I had asked such a question, and told me not to even think about vegetable oil, that it would immediately void the warranty and probably destroy the car.  I thought about advising him to take a couple of deep breaths.

Again, thanks for keeping me posted; your DIY spirit and competence is an inspiration.