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.
There's a downside to that approach. Thats essentially two different scenarios (partial and full). Unless you get into complicated load shedding, you'll potentially have to get some pretty monstrous batteries which can get expensive quickly. You might even have to size up inverters to offer the instantaneous power demand that you might get with running the house and some large power tools simultaneously. If you don't you'll trip breakers and then have no power anywhere until you manually shed some loads.
Hey, I appreciate the advice as I still have much to learn. Yes, I do already plan on loading up on batteries, but the shop is really a stretch goal I don't think I'll shoot for in the near term. I would initially like to size the equipment to handle the whole house (not w/shop), but only have essential loads supported for now and bump up capacity (more battery/panels) as time goes on.