I would kill (well, maybe not kill, but you know...) for an 18kW solar set-up.
Would probably need to be at least double that to cover the night time. Do you only mine during the day, or do you have a battery?
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
I only mine in the day, its just personal choice, I wouldnt sleep for fear of my PC burning the house down anyway :)
I have a 4kW solar array onmy roof.
Im in the UK (51 degrees North) so our winters are not great for solarPV, because they are very cloudy and the sun is very weak, sometime I make less than 1kWh (on 10th Dec 2016 I made 0.21kWh) on those days I do still run BOINC and pay for the electric from the grid, but I tend to reduce output. Cold weather is good for solarPV though, so even in winter if its a clear cold day then my array makes a fair bit of power (a few days earlier on 4th Dec 2016 I made 11.3kWh!!), but its only producing anything decent for about 4 hours in the middle of the day. Summer of course is the opposite, with 16 hours a day of daylight and much less cloud, my 4kW system can produce over 25kWh a day, and even a really cloudy and rainy day will still do over 5kWh.
So to get 18kW for 24 hours a day, you would need a solar PV setup that produces 432kWh every day, even in winter, that is a significant sized system, plus batteries which aint cheap. I see you are in NZ though so at around 36 degrees South your winter/summer production would be a lot less variable than mine.
However, you dont have to do it all in one go, you can make a system that covers your summer requirements in daylight and then just contributes in the winter, this could still significanty reduce your energy bills. Self consuming 100% of your solarPV power is usually the most efficient in terms of ROI.