PROJECT TITAN - WEATHER FLOW - SOLAR ACCESSORY
It has been more than six months since I last updated this massive Project thread.
There has been endless things happening during that period and wanted to share some of them with you here. Apologies in advance as many of the photo's have not been loaded to the image server so you will have to just envision what I write here as to what these things are!
On February 21, 2019 I received my pre-production sample of the Weather Flow Solar Panel. The company had taken to heart from the backers that there was a real need for a solar power solution to avoid having to scale a tall ladder in the dead of winter just to change out AA batteries.
Offering this add on accessory would in my mind resolve the following long term issues:
- Battery Cost: Save long term costs in buying eight Energizer Lithium cells. These batteries are fantastic in every way in extreme cold weather and last a very long time. But they cost a hell of lot of money over the long term!
- Safety: Having the the solar panel in place would reduce the incidents a person would have to scale and climb a tall ladder just to replace said batteries in various extreme conditions.
- Longevity: Simply put having the solar panel in place would ensure long term use, reliability, and reduce land fill waste for everyone.
Below is what came in the mail on that faithful day and will go through the system.
Upon opening up the box there is a hand out prominently affixed to the package.
The hand out essentially calls out to remove the 8 existing AA batteries from the unit. It also calls out the new solar panel must be installed following the guide arrows as seen in the picture.
The solar panel comes with a new mounting collar as some field testers / customers found the previous generation units did not offer enough bracing to the pole mount. That resulted in some stations seeing false rain events as the main unit would shake / move causing vibration which in turn was captured by the haptic sensor array.
The new solar panel is extremely small and the pre production unit was extremely well built. This is the top view of the unit and as seen the solar panel is fixed in place. I was really hoping the panel would offer a flex joint to address different environmental conditions such as mounting, lighting, and snow.
At the top are two brass pins which engage the Sky unit to supply + / - VDC.
An underside view of the solar panel hardware.
For scale purposes I placed a *Canadian* quarter next to the unit to show case how big / small the unit really is.
The entire process took less than three minutes to install and mount the new accessory to the Weather Flow Sky. But of course Mother Nature had to remind me that it's still Winter!!
As noted up above ideally if the solar panel had a flex hinged joint it would allow debris to fall off better. To be fair however the snow that came down on this day was the type that just sprinkled and was sticky. I don't believe even if the solar panel was 90* vertical it would have made much of a difference as that type of snow just clings to everything.
Regardless, with the units built in lithium battery cells along with endless solar charging this hardware will continue to operate for years to come. I won't have to break out the wallet every second year for expensive batteries and add to the land fill.
Initial field testing indicates the internal battery was more than capable of supplying a constant 3.31 VDC at -15'C. I will be monitoring this as the mercury drops back to the -35'C in the coming weeks. I really wish this device had arrived when our area broke -55'C as that would truly show case how resilient and capable the internal battery pack is in extreme cold.
When the sun is out the regulated charging system produced (approx) 3.61 VDC to the batteries. I will be very interested to see how this system operates in the opposite extreme of +35'C and the solar rays are more intense in the summer time.
Summary: The Weather Flow company has yet again offered more value and performance to their new smart weather station. There isn't a hard date or price point but gather the unit will go into production by late spring or early summer. I believe the MSRP is still being hashed out but expect the unit to hover around $65.00 USD or below.
Regardless, even at $65.00 USD the ROI would only be a few years for the solar panel to pay for itself vs constant battery replacements!!
PROJECT TITAN - APC UPS - NEW DEPLOYMENT STRATEGY
For those who have taken the time to read through this massive multi year projects thread will recall. In the past I had no less than eight Symetra 120 / 240 VAC on line UPS powering my home.
One only need go to the APC website to see how big these units are (refrigerator size) and how much space they take.
As noted many times here my long term goal has been to reduce my energy foot print while balancing the security of my home. In this case ensuring my home was well protected against a short to long term power event. After more than nine years I had to finally give these amazing UPS systems up to allow the basement renovations to start.
There simply was no way for me to keep eight massive refrigerator sized UPS's in my basement and allow me to build out the home. As such, I had to come up with a secondary plan which really was a stop gap vs what is in the pipe line now.
Below is just a glimpse of what has been in the works for the last 18 months. I know it's a little hard to tell what the hell you're looking at. But that is over eight feet of APC UPS goodness which encompasses no less than 22 pure sine wave rack mount online UPS systems in various wattage output.
This old picture show cases some of the five UPS systems being staged for their new home. I had to place them on to dollies because each unit exceeds 85 lbs!
This is another set I had staged onto another dolly which held seven of the APC UPS systems.
A group photo of the twelve pure sine wave APC units being prepped for their final deployment. I'll go into more details as to the mythology behind going this route and topology layout. The remaining ten units are still in their shipping containers and will have to make time to stage and prep when I can.
As some of you may or not recall I was able to purchase 12 massive server racks from a surplus sale a few summers ago. Some of them I sold while a few I kept thinking they would be used at home. It came as no great surprise the shear size and depth of these racks was not sustainable in my home.
Thus the hunt for an alternative racking solution which I will detail later below.
A quick look of one of the APC Pure Sine Wave UPS online systems currently being tested and deployed in my home. This image capture comes from the APC AP9631 NMC and will detail more about the capability of this Network Management Card below.
In this image capture in green it indicates the last battery transfer which essentially means what kind of activity has occurred and captured by the system. This can be anything from a voltage sag, voltage spike, self test, manual test, power outage, etc. In red is the operational run time the unit will provide for a specific load and in this case the system is capable of providing 200 hours.
That is currently based on a 950 watt load which equates to 8.33 days of back up power to the critical systems in my home.
In blue is the monitored battery temperature and in orange is the line voltage coming into the home along with the frequency.
Yet upon installing this fantastic piece of software not only did he include almost every idea and suggestion I posed. But made it better from the concept to idea and this is what we have now.
Having several professional and prosumer UV detectors which never exceeded *Consistently* 10. 
At the current exchange rate that comes out to $8252.00 CDN for 12 NMC!! 
