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Good physical "solar sinks" for excess PV power?

 
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I'm sure some of you here have encountered this: due to seasonality & buffer, you probably oversize your PV system a little. Even though you have battery storage, there's a lot of time throughout the year that your batteries are fully charged by 10am and all that juicy solar electricity is going down the drain (or wherever it goes lol).

Someone phrased it in another thread about pre-cooling your house with AC during that time as a "solar sink" and I like that concept: are there physical things we can "sink" that excess energy into, given that we already have the solar incoming? It's sort of like adding a rain catchment system under a gutter, I suppose. Just to stop the waste of an existing resource flow.

Ideas:
- Pre-cool the thermal mass of your house (even if that's just a stickframe and your furniture) with AC
- Chill down the freezer
- Pre-heat something in the winter
- Dry firewood with an electrically powered kiln
- Dry/harden something more intensive with a kiln or oven (isn't cement made this way?)
- Power a flywheel for later energy use
- Pump water uphill, could let it run downhill later (potential energy battery)
- Melt iron ore or something very energy intensive lol
- Mine crypto

Anybody else have any great solar sinks?
 
Rocket Scientist
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  • Heat some water for taking a bath
  • Pre-Heat the thermal mass of your house (in winter)
  • Run a dehumidifier (if you have moisture problems)
  • Run an electric food dehydrator


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    Benjamin Dinkel
    Rocket Scientist
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    Location: Province of Granada, Andalucía, Spain
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    Or my favorite:
    Get grid access and give it to your neighbors, be that for free or even selling it to the grid!
     
    gardener & hugelmaster
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    Possibly add a grid tied inverter that will dump the excess to the grid.
     
    master rocket scientist
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    Oh, it would be nice to share it with the neighbors, but selling to the power company is a losing proposition.
    They pay pennies on the dollar for it and require YOU to purchase transfer equipment to protect linemen working on the transmission lines.
    So, use A/C if it's summer and electric heaters in the winter, OR run your wood splitter and your welders.
     
    Benjamin Dinkel
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    thomas rubino wrote:Oh, it would be nice to share it with the neighbors, but selling to the power company is a losing proposition.


    It often is, but depends on where you are. Here (in Spain) there's contracts in which you use the grid as a virtual battery. You only pay them for what you take more than what you've given them. Which to me is a pretty sweet deal.
    Unfortunately I'm 100 meters from the next connection point and a neighbor got a quote for around 10k euros to get connected...
     
    steward and tree herder
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    Run a compressor and store extra compressed gas.
    Pump water uphill to use for microhydro later
     
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