Oddbean new post about | logout
 That's cool! My goal is to buy and build a cozy home in ~4 years. It might be less than than, but, there's a lot of of my control. 

I am not sure I would use PV panels as roofing, at least the typical roofing. Having that many seams to seal with a non-overlapping system doesn't seem at all practical to me, but I'd be very curious to see what conclusion you come to since it is a fascinating concept.  
 Ahh,
yes, did the install on our travel trailer as well.
A really simple one with one flex panel glued to the roof and connected directly to a chinese battery storage i got cheap on aliexpress. Works out of the box so no need to mention.
I'm planing next to have a fridge in that is provided seperately by it's own panels.
For our house i consider eighter a offgrid solution charging mostly our car or an full on grid system. 
 Funnily enough, my refrigerator is the reason why this got started in the first place. I realized that if the power went out and I had a stuffed fridge, I'd lose a big chunk of money since the single 12V FLA battery is no where near enough to keep the fridge running if pretty goes out for a significant period of time, and worse yet, if the battery dies, I would have no heat in the winter since the furnace requires 12V to run. And that's how I ended up with 1620W of panel, an MPP 3048LV-MK, and more I'm saving up for building a 5kWh 48V nominal battery to start, then I'll be saving up for a 15kWh battery setup, which is kinda silly for my trailer, but then I could also provide power to family/friends if needed.  
 Fully understand. This is a huge solution for a camper.
After having our fridge on our battery i decided to cut it off the system cause it drains the battery in lightspeed.
so it is clear that i will have to find another fridge that is more efficient.
my aim is to use the fridge itself as a storage. Cause indeed it is. So I'll try to find the balance between panels and fridge. Obviously you need to have more power on the fridge when it is hot. But then the sun is shining more so you automatically have a balancing factor. If it is balanced perfectly i guess you'll not need a battery anymore for it. 
This is the main reason i seperated it.
I'll use our fridges at home the same way in future.
Fridge = Energystorage /latency 
 The fridge that came with my trailer is a 12V compressor fridge. It's very electrically efficient compared to  propane/electric combos, and I don't open it often, so, it doesn't cycle much. I'll be happy when I have enough battery storage to not worry about regular use of everything (except the rooftop AC, but, I do plan on running a minisplit next year) even with a string of lies than ideal incoming PV.  
 there was/is some small neigbourhood  pilot project (state sponsored IIRC) in germany that uses panels as defacto roofing so it is possible.

That idea comes from neccessity, I want to optimize both angle and size for winter. Yes it will generate less overall but with oversized installation summer is over kill anyway. 
 That's cool. I think that it could be a useful technology, but, if I ever roof mount panels, I'd want to space them off the roof and use bifacials to help increase off-peak power capture.