We have expanded our off-grid power capabilities, beyond the details already detailed in the earlier blog Our Environmental Story.
As far as we know, we remain Australia's ONLY spirits distillery that is both completely off-grid, as well as being only solar-powered. We do not burn gas, wood, or anything else - our distilling operations wait for good weather and the glorious Heathcote sunshine! And now, it has grown.
Our original Selectronic/BYD system at the distillery has been going strong for 3 years, with no power outages. The local regional on-grid supply experiences black-outs every 4 months or so, with lines down due to winds, trees, and trucks. But when moving into our completed new house one year ago, we had a few weeks where the solar wasn’t quite enough to keep us continuously powered without help from the generator (which we really dislike using). This was unrelated to distilling itself, and just a consequence of a series of heavily clouded days and extra load. We had sized the original system to suit our domestic needs based on consumption from our Melbourne domestic situation. However, it has ended up serving the additional constant loads of the distillery (3 fridges, plus hot water heat-pump), our tiny home (yet another fridge), as well as the new house!
Taking advantage of the Victorian battery rebates, we decided to add a new Sigenergy system up at the house, "downstream" from the existing system at the distillery. We’ve had the additional energy system now for a month, and it is quite a design!
The new system adds another 24kWh of battery storage (same as the distillery), and 9kW of solar panels (17kW at distillery). Further than that, we've added a 15kW EV charger at the house, a 7kW one at the distillery, AND a power-supply link from the house to the "upstream" distillery system.
So, it works like this:
- The house is able to look after itself, most of the time. It has its own panels, powers the house and our domestic needs.
- Once the batteries are full at the house, excess solar power is diverted to our new electric vehicle (BYD Atto 3). The car stores 60kWh itself, which is enormous.
- If the house batteries runs low, our bi-directional Sigenergy system can draw power back out of the EV to run the house! We allow the system to use up to 50% of the car's capacity - which is approx 30kWh, bigger than the primary system! In theory, we could then pop into town, top-up the car battery, and bring it back to the house if we wanted.
- If the car isn't there, or is also low on charge, the Sigenergy can also draw on our original Selectronic system, treating it as "grid" (as far as the house system knows).
- If the house, car, and distillery batteries are ALL low - only then does the generator come into play. And hopefully that will effectively be "never".
This was all very new and creative for the power installers (the great team at Bendigo SolarPro), who had not done anything like this before - two off-grid systems talking to each other. They had to install some cut-off protection, to ensure neither system was being flooded with unexpected power from the other. This is a pair of relay switches, one at each end, which disable the power interconnect if either battery becomes fully charged. If fully charged, this creates a possibility of excess power (or worse, unexpected quick spikes) being pushed up/down the line with no loads to absorb the power. This extra protection had an initial configuration issue, meaning we once lost power at the house overnight, due to it disconnecting the systems when they should've been connected - while having low battery levels at the house - but this is rectified now.
As an unexpected surprise, it turns out that the solar panels at the distillery are a huge beneficial resource for us. The 17kW of power collection at the distillery far outpaces the mere 9kW at the house. Fortunately, we can manually transfer charge from the distillery - either to top-up the house battery, or else pump a heap more power into the EV fast charger with the combined power of both systems. As we enter winter in June 2026, we've been using this power transfer quite a bit!
Lastly, our customer-accessible Tesla EV charger is now installed and available at our Loading Bay. This resource is freely available for distillery customers, on good weather days. If we have 50% cloud cover or less, that's enough to power the 7kW EV charger (daytime, of course). Now, we know that 7kW is not an especially fast charger, compared to 50kW at the commercial chargers. But if you're tempted to drop-in to visit for some gin flights and cocktails, your car can enjoy 10-15kWh of juice while you enjoy! See you soon!
