The graph is from the electric company website showing my usage for a single day last week. It was sunny all last week, so pretty much every day's usage looks like that graph. The little peaks around 1pm are when I made lunch since I can't run the electric range from the power station. I could have run things for about 3-4 more hours from the power station, but I like to end the day with it charged to at least 90% in case I need to use it for a power outage.
This is just my trial PV setup with 800W of PV on the south-facing side of the house and another 800W on the west-facing side so I get a pretty continuous 600W throughout the day. I'm currently using an Anker Power Station which is limited to 60V and 600 watts of input, so I'm not getting the most out of my PV panels.
Today I ordered two, big 16 KWh batteries and a 10KW inverter to finally start my "big boy" PV installation (for comparison, that's 32x the capacity of this power station and 5x the total wattage in addition to supporting 220v split-phase). That will let me take better advantage of the panels since I can put all 8 in series for less losses (partial shading notwithstanding).
I've been planning on building this out all winter and am finally seeing it through. Totally unrelated (/s), but my electric rate just got hiked another $0.01/KWh so I wanted to get this in place before A/C season kicks in.
What’s the cyclical wave every ~3 hours or so?
That I'm not sure, but likely various misc/intermittent loads that aren't running from the power station (bathroom lights/fan, electric range, etc). The one right before 8am is probably the coffee machine, and the bump around 1pm is when I made lunch.
The graph is also confusing. Like, I know my homelab runs at about 0.25 KWh continuously but the graph is in half hour increments so shows it as half that.
Someone else suggested fridge/freezer, but electric motors are usually “spikes” for startup. No idea what a smooth wave’s cause would be.
It does kind of match that, energy profile-wise, but fridge was definitely on the power station and isn't reflected in the graph from 8am to 5pm. I wanted to make sure I could run that from PV alone and after that was confirmed, just kept putting it on PV during the day. That, and the usage graph seems to be averaged over 30 minute intervals, so I don't think a momentary spike like a motor's startup draw would show like it would with a realtime graph.
We’ll never know.
Oh, I'm stupid lol. I was only referring to the PV period from 8-5. On the full 24 hour graph, including the times it's not on PV, that probably is the fridge
Maybe fridge/freezer?
Fridge/freezer is running from the power station, but the huge spike around 6pm is it kicking into its defrost cycle after I took it off the PV.
Could be.