Plants, Battery

On Wednesday I picked up all 350 plant guards and stakes, etc. for our native plants we are getting. Today I picked up 300 tube stock plants, 21 different species, so quite a variety. There were three boxes each with 100 plants. I should get the remaining 50 sometime in May. I have a lot of rushes, tussock grass, iris, flax lilies, and something called sagg which I can plant out in clusters fairly close together. I also have 30 of the Blackwood which are the taller trees out in the middle of the paddock near the ditch, eucalyptus, banksias, wattles, and tee trees. I also have a few shrubs out on the nature strip that I want to plant in the front yard between us and the neighbour, and have already sprayed some spots there to kill the grass.

The other thing is that we decided to go ahead with getting a battery and hybrid inverter for the solar panels. The installer came on Wednesday and got it all done as well as redoing our power switchboard/fuse box. That bit was a few hundred dollars on top of the battery and inverter installation. There were a few issues, the first night the battery discharged down to 0% because the settings were wrong, but I got ahold of the support people for that and they talked me through putting in the correct values. Last night it kept a 15% charge so there were no more issues. The other thing is that the monitoring app is a bit glitchy, and apparently the people in China at the company headquarters are making changes to it on the fly. However, the inverter itself has a screen on the front and you can monitor the activity and make changes if you want. Today I put in all the settings for the time of use electricity we have here so that the battery will be topped up with Off Peak power if needed and then it can be used for Peak power time. I suppose they will eventually get the app working better but for now I am happy. This has been the first good day of sunshine for the week so far, 21 kWh from our solar panels, 8 kWh self use, 10 kWh to charge the battery and 2 kWh fed into the grid at $0.08883 per kWh. So, everything is working as it should so far. 

Apart from being able to charge the battery at off-peak prices and then use it during peak pricing times, the other feature that useful is that when there is a mains power cut you still have power. The way the wiring is in the switchboard, the main light and power circuit will continue to operate either on solar or until the battery discharges down to 20%. The circuit that runs the hot water and heat pumps are disabled, but the fan on the wood stove would keep running so we can stay warm if needed. We can also cook dinner, watch TV, check email, etc. I’ve tested this by turning off the mains power and it appears to work as advertised.

For the weekend I will probably be out planting some of the reeds and grasses in the areas I first sprayed with roundup a couple of weeks ago. It is all supposed to be planted by the end of May but I don’t think that will be a problem.