Oddbean

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.

Yes I’m still figuring out the indoor wiring for our 13kW system for the house. We have a few panels on our travel van with a basic 12v system to run a few freezers, lights, fans, etc The key is your battery storage, and where a lot of your money will go

Cool. I’ve learned some things the hard way, but where code is concerned it’s not my bag. I unhooked the grid from my breaker box, routed it through two 100A fuses and put one leg into the Victron for grid power, the other used as the phased leg for the 240V appliances as my inverter doesn’t have 240V.

Yep. GFCI was fine, PITA at times, but a lifesaver particularly in the bathroom and kitchen, but AFCI in the breaker box trips all the time for no apparent reason in my experience. Enough to be a royal PITA and frankly dysfunctional in most use cases.

My BIL's dishwasher CANNOT run a full cycle on an AFCI breaker. I would NEVER use either an AFCI or GFCI breaker for anything fridge or freezer related, either. Plus, those types of breakers are wear items and must be replaced likely every 10 years or so, which is stupid. Give me an regular SquareD QO breaker that will just do its job for decades without issue. Bathroom GFCI should be at the end-point with a GFCI outlet, IMO. But WTF do I know?

Right. I think a GFCI outlet on anything within reach of the sink (direct ground) is probably a good idea in the kitchen, but design can prevent the most egregious risks. Fully agree with the outlet placement of GFCI too. Apparently you know a bit about the important things! 😊 I usually use Siemens breakers and boxes, but I think they’re fairly similar to SquareD. Growing up we had an old fridge and if you touched it and the sink at the same time it would make your joints rattle a bit. 😬 Much has changed since those days though. I doubt most fridges even have conductive handles or body panels anymore.

Siemens has a few different grades to their product line same as SquareD. You won't ever catch me installing the homeline BS into my own home, though. Those things are chintzy POSs... I actually tend to prefer Siemens for industrial stuff. Their big, chunky throw switches just feel "right." Most appliances are safer than some of the older stuff, but gosh, they are way too expensive and break way too often.