Thomas shares makes

Rollershutters

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Shutter control panel

When we renovated our living room, we upgraded the window roller shutters with electric motors. While we usually only open and close all of them together, we still want to be able to set them to individual positions. I decided to make a central control panel with 6 physical buttons and implement some logic in the Siemens Logo controller to control the motors.

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Solar Matched Electric Heating

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A heater power-controlled to consume all excess solar production!

I built a prototype test setup that makes sure every Watt produced by our solar panels is used by an electric heater. It uses an industrial power controller and some code to match the heater's power usage to whatever power is not used by the house.

This would make it possible to maximize our solar self consumption, which is required to get a decent return on your solar investment.

For us, injecting to the electricity grid is giving away power, we have to pay about 6x as much compared to what the utility pays us for returning energy to the grid.

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