Brainstorming better ways to handle power for here and a buddy’s project. How can we make our microgrids smarter without spending a bunch of money or developing years of custom stuff?
Here’s my rough sketch, and here’s some cheap gear that will require some hacking but might actually work:
- Wifi-controllable outlets that monitor energy usage and cost <$10 each. As with many of the cheapest wifi-connected things right now, you’ll need a 2.4Ghz network.
- Decent solar charge controller for < $150. A project to talk with it via a raspberry pi, and another.
- Victron stuff is not cheap, but they have a bunch of open source elements.
With some but not a ton of work, we can get to a setup that controls power to different “tiers” of devices, monitors the health of our batteries, logs our power usage by device tier, and overall makes it easier to be offgrid… or at least provides a bunch of data about how we’re using our power as we try to do so;)