Chile Forum

admin wrote:Regarding imports, all the solar panels, winmills, and so on are all sold in Chile. You just got to do your homework. There is a place on the highway south of Puerto Varas that specializes in renewable energy including windmills and other solutions. As I understand a gringo owns it (will investigate).

Great! That's the kind of enterpreneurs our country need. People that manufacture here. Do you have pictures or refferences?

I'm a big fan of composting, but I have to say, it isn't as easy as it sounds.

I've been trying to compost all year and while I did get the organic matter to shrink down considerably, I never did get the pile to heat up, and after an entire year, I still don't have usable compost.

It's supposed to be very simple and I am capable of following directions. I joined a composting forum and get advice from the experts. Still no heat.

Not only that, but there are a lot of posters to the compost forum who can't get their compost pile to heat up, so it isn't just me.

And I have to confess that I am not the only one whose compost bin goes through periods when it stinks and has flies. Fortunately, I have not had mice and bears into my compost, but that has happened to other people.

Compost must be turned and mixed occasionally, so the system would have to be set up so that it was possible to turn the compost around whatever plumbing or wiring was in there.

It's hard for me to imagine, since I can't get heat, but it is possible to get too much heat. Every now and again someone's barn burns down because a damp bale of hay caught fire with spontaneous combustion .

Just me, but I wouldn't want to put any money into compost heating until I figured out how to get the compost to heat up.

On the other hand, I've had excellent luck with using passive solar to heat a house.

admin wrote:

Regarding imports, all the solar panels, winmills, and so on are all sold in Chile. You just got to do your homework. There is a place on the highway south of Puerto Varas that specializes in renewable energy including windmills and other solutions. As I understand a gringo owns it (will investigate).

Do you mean Nelson Stevens at "Wireless Energy" near Puerto Montt? Stevens is no amateur.

Parcela 6, Ruta 5 Sur Km. 1017 - Puerto Montt Fono: +56-65-292100 Fax: +56-65-292102 info@renovable.cl
His website http://www.wireless-energy.cl/quienes_somos.html

Article on him - in Spanish. Note his comments on doing renewables business in Chile
http://www.ingenieros.cl/index2.php?opt ... Itemid=282

Pinguin seems to have missed your point about all of this material being available in Chile as a result of foreign engineering and manufacturing. High manufacturing production costs and quality control issues in Chile plus hecho-en-chile market perceptions would probably make local production uncompetitive.

Answer to earlier issue of why the Chilean utilities are reluctant to allow grid tie-in for "individual" or small photovoltaic producers.

In the civilised countries this may not be so much an issue but evidently the majority of the inverters sold and used in Chilean photovoltaic systems do not assure sufficiently clean 240 vac power. Any inverter proposed for use in a grid tie-in must be a full sine wave type and certified as to its output characteristics. An approved inverter in Chile would cost you dearly -- the smallest capacity types would start at about USD1000. Also any system proposed for grid tie-in has to have approved switching so that no power is fed to the grid when grid power is down. At least that is the perspective of the local utility.

I have been told it is also a matter of the way urban electricity is distributed, it’s a bit of chaos (no news there), and that rural areas with much more linear distribution systems may be the first to have intertie available, several large wineries may be a test bed for the design.

Followup on the cost issue for the rural installations, for the IV region Coquimbo. The rural locations that are receiving photovoltaic electricity only pay 25% of the cost, with the rest being paid by the general tax fund for the government of the Coquimbo region. The rural electrification project provided about 3000 subsidised independent (nonconnected) solar installations for remote outposts.

There is also a small experimental solar farm that feeds a network in this region (10 panels, 15 m2). The inverter has a capacity of 1.85 kW and weighs about 25 kg. No word on the price but it's not for your backyard producer.

This was an issue I was reluctant to bring up before, as it may have appeared overly nit-picky at the time but in a lot of places the Chilean Sine wave..... isn't.
For instance I heard that the local Casino will have to fit expensive powerline filters as the multitude of switchmode PSUs they use in the slot machines are appreciably distorting the local power. This issue is only now starting to being taken seriously by the power distributors.

You fit a true sinewave inverter, but its not feeding into a sinewave supply, so does it attempt to follow the distortion or will it try to compensate for the whole of Chile's crappy power ? It can't, but the resultant current inrush/outflows at different points in the cycle may generate some strange effects, none good for your inverter.

Also, just by looking at the state of some of the local wiring, the variable impedances of the individual empalmes and sector feeds will determine where the outgoing current eventually ends up in a somewhat uncontrolled way. Never mind phase imbalance.
I am pretty unfamiliar with the idea of reselling home-generated electricity, but I can see those drawbacks.
Another problem that I can foresee is that at 7:30 pm on a Winter's night when electricity demand is at it's peak, contribution from solar sources would be nil.