Residential Backup Battery Installed

In an earlier posting, I outlined how we initiated our solar panel project. Although the current weather condition prevents us from installing the solar panels at this point, we can install all of our required inverters and backup batteries.

On February the 22nd, we connected our Schneider Hybrid inverters to the grid, and on the 23rd, we connected the Pylontech LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries.

We configured the inverters so that the batteries will be discharged during the peak hours and charged during off-peak hours, effectively performing consumption time-shifting so that we can take advantage of the lower rates:

From Alectra Utilities

As you can see the savings are quite significant, more than 50%.

On February the 24th, was our first full day of usage when we tested our time-shifting configuration, and we found that it worked quite well. The battery capacity was enough to cover all of our on-peak hours usage save for the last remaining on-peak hour period.

Notice that we have more green in the off-peak hours because we are storing that capacity in the form of battery storage. I will play around with the configuration some more to see if I can shift the uncovered, on-peak hour to the mid-peak period, so that I have enough battery capacity left to cover all the on-peak periods.

I want to give a big shout out to New Dawn Energy Solutions. They have been very professional and really know their stuff. Any one thinking of installing a solar and/or a battery backup solution within the Greater Toronto Area, should seriously consider them. I highly recommend them and hope to do more business with them in the future.

Stay tune, and I will continue my progress here on the blog.

Gold Bars

This year on January the 31st, I purchased a gold bar from TD Canada Trust. It is one ounce for $2,414.67. The idea is from my wife. She wanted to establish a new trend as her annual birthday gift.

one ounce bar

As the kids are grown up and our RESP savings are being maxed out. the redirection of funds to accumulating gold may not be a bad idea. The world has become a more unpredictable place, the pandemic, and growing geopolitical issues.

This morning I was curious and check the price for the same one ounce of gold and it is sitting at $2,540.03. Already up in about three weeks.

We will continue to monitor to see if this is indeed a good long term investment.

3D Printer to the Rescue!

Traveling Pill Container

It has been a long time since I printed something with my 3D printer. The last project was to print out a traveling pill box, which I ended up using when I went to Montreal during the last Thanksgiving holidays.

This morning my wife approached me with a request to create a part for the Silver Reed LK150 Knitting Machine. This part had custom dimensions, which I had to design with Autodesk Fusion 360.

Silver Reed LK150 Knitting Machine

It has also been a very long time since I designed something with Fusion 360, but kudos to the people at Autodesk to continue to allow people such as myself to use Fusion 360 for free as long as it is for personal use.

As always with these 3D project, it is very much measure three times, and draw once. I have to re-acclimate myself with how to use Fusion 360, but after about fifteen minutes, I was back at it, drawing lines, and creating polygons. The final outcome is shown below.

3D Printed Result

As you can see, I did a pretty good job!