First Snow and Electric Vehicles

The installation of the solar water heater was completed, and finally, all construction was finished! Fully equipped!
The story of how that happened at the end of January is here ⬇️

As soon as we entered February, when the cold really sets in, it snowed!
And by the end of the month, there were cloudy skies and long rains.
For our off-grid home, it was a tough month.

Although we are now in the middle of warm spring weather, this time I will tell you about the time we were in a pinch during the first snow (^^)/

・I want to test drive (test use) an electric vehicle for free!

The electricity generated by the solar panels on the roof can be used not only for daily life
but also to charge an electric vehicle.

Since we have experimentally installed a "V2H" system, we can not only charge the car but also perform "power supply" to extract electricity from the car, but...

Our car is currently a gasoline vehicle, so we cannot use the V2H system we went to the trouble of installing (tears).

So, I inquired with several car dealerships and asked to borrow an electric vehicle, and Nissan Motor understood our experimental situation!

So, I booked a "test use," not a "test drive," for a Monday, avoiding the weekend.

・It actually snowed on the day of the electric vehicle test use

I booked it for February 5th.
On top of the snow forecast from a few days prior, it rained during the day the day before, so we couldn't generate or store enough electricity.

And on the day itself, it was cloudy from the morning with no power generation expected, and by before noon, the stored electricity was at 5%!
In a real power-outage pinch, I tried supplying power (discharging) from the car for the time being.

We don't buy electricity.
But there is no electricity stored in the storage battery.
In such a case, "the car acts as a storage battery"
was the purpose of installing V2H, so it is an excellent situation for an experiment.

・I tried charging the storage battery from the car in the snow!

And finally, in the afternoon, it started to snow.
The photo at the beginning shows us receiving electricity from the car into our home amidst that snowfall (lol).

The capacity of our home's storage battery is 14.9 kWh.

The storage capacity of the Nissan Leaf we borrowed is 40–60 kWh.
Thinking of an electric vehicle as a substitute for a storage battery is very reliable.

However, the price is also quite impressive at over 4 million yen.

The subsidy is up to 850,000 yen (national) plus alpha (up to 450,000 yen in Tokyo), so it's a difficult decision whether to try hard and buy one.

※ The off-grid rate calculation for the snowy day of February 5th is recorded and calculated as part of January due to the electricity billing period (1/12 to 2/9).

kame: How to live in an off-grid house