DIY Solar PV Installation - Can it save me money?

Can I put a solar panel on the roof of my shed and use it to power my server farm, or will I just waste all my money?

Our energy prices are ridiculous and even taking into account recent "world events" I find it hard to understand why electricity is so expensive. So I figured I'd try to do something about it by installing my own battery and solar system on my shed. The idea being to power my servers from the sun.

After doing a bit of research I decided a 300W panel, 2Ah of lead acid AGM batteries and a hybrid inverter. This is based off the idea that

* My server setup uses 100W of power constantly
* I have an energy tariff that gives me 7.5p/kWh for four hours at night and 38p during the remaining 20 hours of the day

So if I can avoid using expensive peak rate electricity, I can charge the system up at night, then use solar to maintain the batteries during the day, hopefully giving me enough power to last the evening.

This should save me about £22 a month if the system works.

[willofirony]

Well thanks for taking one for the team. A lot of faith has been put into the lifetime of lithium batteries. I have had many lithium batteries that have lasted less than 4 years. So, I think one has to operate on the assumption that they are capable of lasting for 10 years IF they are of the highest quality. Just do not bank on all L-ion batteries to last that long. The conversion to EVs (which I support totally) will be a good test platform for batteries. Look out for Sodium batteries. Excellent video! Given your goal, the project was a success. There is a tendency to isolate ourselves from failure.

[ctrlaltrees]

Great video! Nice to see someone else taking the exact same journey of "generating my own electricity is cool! I can't believe how well it works!" and then doing the actual maths on how long it will take to pay for itself 😅

Of course there's still the autonomy and the coolness factor and nobody can take that away from us!

Thankfully a full rooftop install is a *much* better investment... Looking forward to your video on that one.

[____________________________.x]

Yep, every time I look at this idea it never really works out financially, or for the faff required to research and install it all, all those people paying a company to install it must be a bit disappointed? Yet still I keep looking at 2nd hand kit because it's such a cool idea. Financially it might make more sense to plug an extension cable into my neighbours house and we'd share the rip off standing charges... 😬

[whiskeytuesday]

The firefly reference. I caught it. I see you.

[Florin]

Installing solar panels for saving money it's the wrong approach! You install solar panels for autonomy, to still have electricity in case of issues with the grid. And this worth all the money!

[andreweastland]

Thank you, this is something I have thought about doing for a while, i guess you just saved me some money.

[itsanarse]

They can’t take the sun from us, for now!

[arronshutt]

The problem that I can see is that you use the wrong technology. A thorium power reactor can power everything you have and you can sell the rest back to the grid that can offset the cost of the reactor. Also computer systems are very expensive to run compared to the computational capability of the human brain. The human brain uses 12W of power, where a computer is 200W and a laptop can be around 70-100W. All you need is to build an artificial brain or ten and you can run high performance computing off something akin to the power consumption of an ancient laptop. We should talk more about how to build cool future stuff...! ;)