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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • Second hand Renault Zoe user here. I have the model from 2020 with 52kWh battery. Things are pretty ok I think as far as the interior and exterior, but we had major issue with the engine that had to be swapped (good the car was under warranty still in the dealership we bought it from). For the rest it’s pretty smooth ride. The range of the car in spring/summer gets to about 350km so its pretty good. The SOH is 91.3%. Ranault’s warranty on battery is still active until 2028 or 80 000km or when battery’s SOH drops below 75% so for now I am not worried about this. I think once the battery gets low and outside of warranty there will most certainly be more developed infrastructure of third-party battery module maintenance so it should be possible to get the pack to it’s original state for not gigantic sums of money.




  • Solarthermal is something I thought about but seeing how little is produced on the roof now I wonder how much impact it will have. I know the efficiency of solar collectors is about 80% while solar panels are 20-30%, but installation of solar collectors adds more complexity with plumbing and in summer you again have situation where you have nowhere to spend the heat on and need to either close the system (drain it) or cover the collector. Plus it’s not that cheap. It’s mainly reason why we went for solar panels as although solar panels require more space to provide eqiuvalent power, the low maintenance and the fact the energy can be spent on more stuff then just heating water. So I’m looking at diversifying the energy source. Thats why looking into wind.



  • Thanks a lot for the input. I live in NL (so pretty flat) and also have quite some open spaces around the house. This does provide quite some winds (usually north and south) so this is why i tought about it in the first place. As mentioned below, I plan to setup two weather stations in two potential places. I want to monitor it for the duration of the year to have good insight into what winds am I dealing with.

    I was just wondering if such idea, of putting like 5-8 smaller wind turbines connected to inverter/microinverter and then to the grid (so autoconsuming or pushing to the grid when not enough consumption). I was wondering if this is something people do as I did not see much when searching the web. Most people use it to charge batteries.




  • I’m aware of the issues (requirenments) with wind turbines. I havent done much research yet but already saw some that are rather quiet, so this is why I was looking into this (sure need to check exactly and compare real life the noise polution). Looking at some yt videos i see that some of the turbines could produce a fair amount of energy. Where I live I have more wind then solar. And as far as solar goes. In the season, my roof produces so much energy I dont have enough to spend it on. However in winter this gets really bad. for example today my solar production was 1.3kWh while usage 25kWh (thats with temp +4C outside). So even if I would invest and put another 5kWp (or even 10) I would produce nothing near my needs. In most sunny day in january my roof production was 10kWh while usage (it was much colder then the day posted above it was -7C) 54kWh. So Expanding the roof array, does not solve the problem as I would never meet the usage of winter and totally overproduce in summer. Batteries sure help with auto-consumption in summer, but this is not longterm storage solution so you can not use the energy produced in summer in winter. Currently legislation here allows me to compensate my usage 100%, so my balance is good as what I produce in summer I consume from the grid in winter, but in next 5-10 years the procentage will be changing as the gov. wants to encourage autoconsumption. To the point where your overproduction in summer will not match the consumption in winter. The problem is there is nothing to consume in winter from solar.