Fronius –manufacturer of the world’s best solar inverter– is running a competition where anyone was invited to make a short video about why “I am 24 hours of sun”. Time got away from me, and a week ago, Marcus from Fronius dropped into my office while he was in town.
“We only have one week of the competition left Mark” he said late that Friday afternoon. “I’ve left it too late” I thought. It was down to 1 week to go and all I had was a few seconds of footage and draft script. Worse still, my salesman Peter, (who moonlights as an amateur video producer, and has helped me with videos in the past) was out of town.
I went home and told my wife.
“I’ve got one week left to try to win that trip to Wendy. Looks like were not going to Vegas eh”
“Oh Really?” she looked disappointed. “And I was just thinking that I really wanted to get back to the States to see my sister”
Wendy’s sister had a huge health scare this year, just after we spent a week with her at Christmas. Winning the prize would allow me to get to see the unveiling of the highly anticipated Fronius Primo Hybrid in a Las Vegas, and give me an opportunity to geek out at Solar Power International, North Americas biggest solar trade show. But it would also give would give Wendy a chance to see her sister.
“I had to give it a crack” I thought.
So the next day, I went out and bought a drone, and learned to fly it. It was a week of taking videos of my son down the beach (acting as mini-me), taking drone footage of my family down the park, and climbing on the roof of a solar install to and flying my new Phantom 4 above our heads. At night I sat up and worked out how to do voice recordings and edit in iMovie. What a week!
So it’s Thursday morning, August 18 2016. Today Fronius decide the winner. I woke up early as I eagerly await a phone call to see if I win my wife and I a trip to Solar Power International, and give Wendy a chance to see her sister. I’ve seen a couple of the entries on youtube, but who knows what other entries on have gone in that I haven’t seen!
Ah, shucks – I’m already a winner! It was a fun week. I finally justified buying a drone and I learned how to edit short videos : I had a lot of fun with my kids doing it. I get this feeling that my blogs may be slowing down a little, and all the short solar videos I have been meaning to do for work will be on their way soon.
But Vegas would be pretty cool. I’ll be sure to let you know if we win!
Mark
3 Responses
Congrats on being runner up Mark. Hope you and your family have a great trip OS. Appreciate your further insights into possible technical solutions, but at face value, they would appear to be cost prohibitive I suspect. Anyway, I look forward to any of your future posts as they come to hand. Cheers Peter
Hi Peter, if we install batteries, we are not limited to the 33 percent rule, so we can put 8kw or more of panels on the Fronius 5kW. At the time we are producing say 6kW, we can feed 5 through the inverter and the other 1kW to the battery. If we wanted to put much more than about 8kW of panels, we would couple a 5kW Symo with the Symo hybrid. then we could comfortably put 16 kW (or more) of panels on the system, and charge 12 kW of Fronius batteries. 12kW is our upper battery limit currently – but Fronius don’t use the line “shifting the limits” for no reason. More to come! I came runners-up in the competition, but Fronius have invited me to Solar Power International in Las Vegas anyway 🙂 Fronius have heaps more up their sleeve, but they do rigorous testing with everything they release, so things take time. I’ll keep my blog updated!
Indeed Mark! Only having one tracker is a limitation but the same could be said of the 5Kw capacity as this upper limit will prove limited in the long run I feel with the emergence of storage and Electric Vehicles. As such, I believe a higher power capacity for 3 phase hybrid inverters to support larger arrays is necessary. Given your close association with Fronius, I hope you can impress upon them the need for such solutions. Again, good luck in the competition. Cheers Peter