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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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 15x as much compared to what the utility pays us for returning energy to the grid.
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