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Renewable energy at Le Vivray is not grid-tied: it is a mixture of wind, solar and grid. i.e. we do not export it to the national grid (see 1 below).
1. Power station in the turbine control building: invertor, charge controller, rectifier and batteries.
Our construction and installation efforts are entirely independent, and rely on our own detailed research to find high quality parts online at the best possible prices. Since we are not grid-tied, we are not liable to commercial installation fees, approval / certification, or dependent on feed-in tarifs. Grid-tied standard solutions would require a significant financial investment which is against our sustainable philosophy - as well as not being very suitable for our limited wallet! The wind turbines and the solar panels feed into 3 charge controllers. These controllers can handle 45A each. Our circuit system is 48V, 1100Ah, and the chargers charge the system up to 56.8V. Once the batteries are charged, the chargers drop to "float" at 54V. We now have our constantly running 6-15kW OzInverter, that has its own 230vac Mini Grid with 2.75kW static PV array, with a second hand GTI SB3000 on the Mini Grid.
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2. One of the wind turbine control boxes in the turbine control building.
4. Spring water and recycled water system with photovoltaic pumping controls. Also shows pump and pre-tank. The water is then pumped 7m in height into a 1500 litre water storage tank, from where it can gravity feed 200m away into the walled garden - which would otherwise be an uphill journey!
3. Dump loads and switch gear in the house. When the batteries are fully charged, excess power generated, 48v DC, by the wind turbine and photovoltaic panels is re-directed to these 4 heaters.
5. The eco-electricity / mains electricity switching system (bottom right) allow us to manage our needs between on and off-grid depending on availability of electricity stored in our current set-up of 6 banks of 4 batteries (48V system). Our battery management system is very manual at the moment, but we are testing our own prototype battery monitoring circuit to partially automate it.
Le Vivray, 61120 Neuville sur Touques, France
© 2014 Echorenovate Sally Woods-Bryan & Leslie Bryan Microengineering