We've got a ton of batteries...literally!

After dropping in to see Mike and the guys at Battery Direct on Friday, we arranged to pick up our shipment of deep cycle batteries first thing on Saturday morning. Needing a little muscle and a young  back to augment our aging versions of the same, Alex had agreed to give us a hand loading and unloading them. We arrived at about 9am and found the batteries on skid, loaded on the forklift and ready to drop into the box of our pickup truck. We were ready to go in a matter of minutes, and our backs were none the worse for wear! At 113lbs (52kg) each, the load was close to a ton so we took our time getting up the hill to our house to keep from straining our poor old truck.
With Alex doing all the heavy lifting, we managed to unload the batteries within a few minutes. We put them straight into the basement so we don't have to move them too far later on.
If we assume that the XW4024 inverter will be the "brains" of our off-grid power system, then these L-16 lead/acid batteries will be the "muscle" for our off-grid power system. Sixteen of them will provide us with almost 40kW hours of stored electrical power. We are budgeting for an electrical consumption of 6kWH per day, so if we take 50% as the maximum allowable discharge of our batteries, we have a little over 3 days before we need to charge them up. At 1.8kW, our solar array can generate almost 9kWH per day, under ideal conditions (5 hours of beautiful, bright sunshine at 90* to the surface of the panel).  As we all know, life's just not like that. In winter, we can expect many dark, gloomy days with very little power being generated by the array, so we will have a diesel generator to supplement the modules. In the future, we would like to add a wind generator, but given our budget, it will have to wait. It will take the generator several hours to recharge the battery bank from a 50% discharge so having to run it only once, every few days will be a very good thing. 

Carol got us organized cleaning up the floors throughout the house. The plumbing rough-in was completed on Thursday and we had agreed to do the clean-up to save a bit of money. I would never have believed that all those wood chips and sawdust would have been created by running a few pipes! I left her with the upper floors to finish and sneaked off to the  basement to work on installing the inverter, e-panel and assorted other parts of the electrical system.  Needing a couple of special tools to attach the e-panel, most of that project is on hold until tomorrow. We turned our attention to one of Carol's "must-haves" - the toilet. Earlier in the week, we had picked up a dual flush toilet at Rona. We wanted a the 4l/6l water mizer flushing system to keep our water consumption and septic usage to a minimum. The drains were all hooked up properly to the septic system so, as long as we manually hauled water to fill the toilet each time, we could use it like normal. We were thwarted by the toilet flange being plugged for testing, and not wanting to damage anything. We decided to investigate our options online and then install the toilet tomorrow (Sunday). We'll see if that works out!