My Goal to never pay for charging (Solar)

[linuxgangster]

Hey everyone. I am new here. Been the owner of a 2023 Ford Lightning XLT for about 2 weeks now. Bought the truck used for a ridiculous deal after trading in my 2019 Ram 1500. Anyway, I purchased this vehicle with the idea that I never have to pay for charging. This is my first EV vehicle. In September I completed a major project to run my house off of Solar and rarely pull the grid. This setup was designed to also never sell back to the grid. I am not interested in getting pennies for my solar when I can put that excess in batteries. So with that said let me show you guys what I have:

EG4 18Kpv - This is my hybrid inventer. It can accept up to 21kw in Solar
14Kw of solar - This is actually getting expaned later this year with a Pergola I am building to hold an additional 4.5Kw of solar
4 x 14.3Kwh batteries - This is for a grand total of 57.2Kwh of storage. These batteries run my house overnight and also help on cloudy or raining days
Empria EVSE - I bought this EVSE because I was already running a Empria Vue to monitor my energy usage at the house
Home Assistant - For building automation
Solar Assistant - For monitoring my Solar setup

I have only ran the solar since September but I have a really good understanding of my usage. So far on most days the batteries are at 100% by 1:00PM. If we had a cloudy or rainy day the previous day I still can get them charged from 15% to 100% unless its another cloudy day. So far since we have set this system up (Sept) we have only had to pull around 250Kwh of power from the grid which is rougly $30. So as you can see I should have plenty of extra on most days to charge my Lightning.

Over the past few days I have been coding a automation for charging my truck with excess solar. Here is how it works.

Automation first checks if the EVSE is hooked up to the truck
Automation then checks my battery state of charge. If the state of charge is greater than 99% it then turns the EVSE on and sets it to a current of 6.
Automation then checks my battery power every 2 minutes. If the number is greater then 0 it raises the current by 2. It will continue to do this until the the battery power is less than 0.
Automation will run until the battery state of charge is 95%

It took me a few days of debugging this but I seem to have it working properly which is very exciting. Now all I have to do is plug my charger in and let the automation do its thing. It will also send me messages to my phone periodically letting me know when it starts and stops. I would love to also check the truck directly and send alerts to my phone about the trucks State of charge but it seems like Ford has made this difficult. If anyone is interested in my code just shoot me a PM. Will be happy to share it

I am located in the DFW area of Texas if anyone is interested in seeing my setup.

Attatched is a screenshot of my current production. As you can see its been cloudy so production is down.

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[Ricks Lightning]

At .12 cents a kwh, how much power do you use per month?

My power in Los Angeles is anywhere from .21-.27 per kwh plus taxes. First 700 kwh per 60 days is .21. Next tier is .27 but when I average out my 1220 kwh my cost is .27 out the door per kwh. Over 60 days.

Yours being much cheaper, seems like you have a longer time for your Return on Investment.

What's your storage batteries composed of?

What's your cost for this system? Any good state incentives?

Right now I have the fridge freezer on a 500 watt pv system. 2000 watt psw inverter with 4- 65ah lead acid batteries. The fridge cycles approx 4x per hour 15 min on 15 min off. At approx 80 watts running load, Plus start up demand load.
Want to add a large led TV that runs 14 hours a day at approx 88 watts.
This will bring down my grid power for mostly my Lightning. Prior to the lightning I was running approx 7-8 kwh daily. Now roughly 20-21 kwh.
But remember our gasoline charges are the highest in the nation. Approx 4.50 a gallon and diesel even higher.
My Nissan Nv is approx 6mpg and diesel sprinter is 12 mpg. Average speed is 11 mph.
My Lightning is at 2.3 mpkwh and working the numbers I'm at 15mph presently.

Thanks for your expert input.

Rick

 

[Magendi]

Very cool. Are you willing to share total investment on the system? I wonder if you’d be better off charging the truck when home batteries are lower than 99% as you can still treat the truck as another battery in an emergency (or run of cloudy days) and it might reduce duty cycle on the home batteries.

 

[linuxgangster]

Very cool. Are you willing to share total investment on the system? I wonder if you’d be better off charging the truck when home batteries are lower than 99% as you can still treat the truck as another battery in an emergency (or run of cloudy days) and it might reduce duty cycle on the home batteries.

After tax credits this whole system is looking to be around 25k. The bulk of the pricing for me was the batteries. They ran me 12k total (before tax credit).

I am experimenting with the battery state of charge percentage. The code will likely evolve over time. I also need to get my Pergola built so I can get the additional panels up.

And you are right about the truck serving as a backup. I do have the 9kwh generator and my inverter has a generator input that can be used for this.

 

[Magendi]

That sounds like a decent price for such a capable system. It will be interesting to see if you have any stretches over the winter and into spring rainy season that you can’t keep up with demand but seems like so far you are using utility power very little. Very cool.

 

[swajames]

Nice setup. Which batteries did you install?

 

[linuxgangster]

That sounds like a decent price for such a capable system. It will be interesting to see if you have any stretches over the winter and into spring rainy season that you can’t keep up with demand but seems like so far you are using utility power very little. Very cool.

You would be suprised how much energy you can get on a cloudy day. Most days I am pulling enough to power the house. Unless there is a major rainstorm going on its producing. Bi-facial panels are awesome for cloudy days and things like snow.

 

[linuxgangster]

Nice setup. Which batteries did you install?

EG4 Indoor wall mount batteries. When they are on sale they go for around 3k each. They are 14.3KWh each. They sell an outdoor unit but being in Texas I cant imagine them doing great in our sun. Plus I had room in the garage

 

[Maquis]

I though charging with excess solar was an inherent feature of the Emporia monitor/EVSE combo?

 

[linuxgangster]

I though charging with excess solar was an inherent feature of the Emporia monitor/EVSE combo?

It is but it only works if you sell back to the grid. It also has no way to tell what my batteries are at since I don't buy into there battery system (they want way to much for it). So I essentially setup MQTT to read from my inverter and Home Assitant plugin to read the EVSE to code my own solution.

This is a pic of my power dash board. I set this up for my wife to help her decide if running the dryer (one of our largest power hogs) is going to put us in the negative.

 

[Scorpio3d]

After tax credits this whole system is looking to be around 25k. The bulk of the pricing for me was the batteries. They ran me 12k total (before tax credit).

I am experimenting with the battery state of charge percentage. The code will likely evolve over time. I also need to get my Pergola built so I can get the additional panels up.

And you are right about the truck serving as a backup. I do have the 9kwh generator and my inverter has a generator input that can be used for this.

I used Solartime in Richardson for my solar install. They build a nice pergola!

I went the easy route with a Tesla powerwall 3 Mainly because it has the automatic grid disconnect if power goes out, I can still produce and use solar.

 

[linuxgangster]

I used Solartime in Richardson for my solar install. They build a nice pergola!

I went the easy route with a Tesla powerwall 3 Mainly because it has the automatic grid disconnect if power goes out, I can still produce and use solar.

Very cool. I like the simple design. I plan to build mine from 4x6's, 2x12's and 2x6's. Mine will be roughly 15ft x 20ft. I just need to get the back yard leveled first.

My system seamlessly switches between battery/grid and solar. You never know unless you are looking at the monitoring app. The solar prioritizes the house load, then anything extra it throws into the battery. If the battery and solar are not enough it will automatically pull from the grid. Once solar stops producing it switches to batteries. Once the batteries go below 15% it then will switch to grid. If this happens it will wait for the batteries to reach 20% the next day until it starts pulling from them again.

 

[Kit2874]

Hey everyone. I am new here. Been the owner of a 2023 Ford Lightning XLT for about 2 weeks now. Bought the truck used for a ridiculous deal after trading in my 2019 Ram 1500. Anyway, I purchased this vehicle with the idea that I never have to pay for charging. This is my first EV vehicle. In September I completed a major project to run my house off of Solar and rarely pull the grid. This setup was designed to also never sell back to the grid. I am not interested in getting pennies for my solar when I can put that excess in batteries. So with that said let me show you guys what I have:

EG4 18Kpv - This is my hybrid inventer. It can accept up to 21kw in Solar
14Kw of solar - This is actually getting expaned later this year with a Pergola I am building to hold an additional 4.5Kw of solar
4 x 14.3Kwh batteries - This is for a grand total of 57.2Kwh of storage. These batteries run my house overnight and also help on cloudy or raining days
Empria EVSE - I bought this EVSE because I was already running a Empria Vue to monitor my energy usage at the house
Home Assistant - For building automation
Solar Assistant - For monitoring my Solar setup

I have only ran the solar since September but I have a really good understanding of my usage. So far on most days the batteries are at 100% by 1:00PM. If we had a cloudy or rainy day the previous day I still can get them charged from 15% to 100% unless its another cloudy day. So far since we have set this system up (Sept) we have only had to pull around 250Kwh of power from the grid which is rougly $30. So as you can see I should have plenty of extra on most days to charge my Lightning.

Over the past few days I have been coding a automation for charging my truck with excess solar. Here is how it works.

Automation first checks if the EVSE is hooked up to the truck
Automation then checks my battery state of charge. If the state of charge is greater than 99% it then turns the EVSE on and sets it to a current of 6.
Automation then checks my battery power every 2 minutes. If the number is greater then 0 it raises the current by 2. It will continue to do this until the the battery power is less than 0.
Automation will run until the battery state of charge is 95%

It took me a few days of debugging this but I seem to have it working properly which is very exciting. Now all I have to do is plug my charger in and let the automation do its thing. It will also send me messages to my phone periodically letting me know when it starts and stops. I would love to also check the truck directly and send alerts to my phone about the trucks State of charge but it seems like Ford has made this difficult. If anyone is interested in my code just shoot me a PM. Will be happy to share it

I am located in the DFW area of Texas if anyone is interested in seeing my setup.

Attatched is a screenshot of my current production. As you can see its been cloudy so production is down.

Going to take you while to get to your ROI back... But interesting project.
Also, I use Arch by the way.

 

[linuxgangster]

Going to take you while to get to your ROI back... But interesting project.
Also, I use Arch by the way.

ROI is roughly 6-7 years with the amount we use in electricity...and if you equate the savings from moving to a EV its obviously less since I no longer pay for gas and charge for free. I am saving about $2100 a year on gas. Plus electric prices are always going up

 

[Scorpio3d]

ROI is roughly 6-7 years with the amount we use in electricity...and if you equate the savings from moving to a EV its obviously less since I no longer pay for gas and charge for free. I am saving about $2100 a year on gas. Plus electric prices are always going up

Yeah, our electric prices used to be cheap(I guess they still are relative to some other states), but the state government got involved to fix the grid after snowmageddon shut down the whole state. Now prices are just increasing each year. That is mostly why I installed solar!

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