Posted on 03/21/2014 6:38:18 AM PDT by Shaun_MD
hey fellow freepers, I need some advice.
I'm trying to set up a small solar panel system in case the grid goes down. I know I won't be able to power the whole house, but I want to be able to run a 750 watt deep well pump, a couple of 40 watt lights, a ceiling fan or box fan, cb base station and maybe a small freezer/refrigerator. I've got a 12v 100 watt solar panel, a 2000w 12v pure sine wave inverter and a 200 amp hour agm battery. Plus a 30 amp charge controller.
Will this be enough? I'm mainly concerned with making my battery last as long as possible and not kill it with undercharging/overcharging since these suckers are expensive.
I'd like to hear your thoughts and suggestions! Thanks
Some are experimenting with using wind and solar to drive a system that separates oxygen from hydrogen in regular old tap water.
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The separation of hydrogen and oxygen require electrical energy to break down the molecular bond. It requires significantly more energy than you can make from burning the gases to run a generator. Each step of the system has losses.
Hydrogen has very low specific gravity and generates a LOT of heat compressing it to a sufficient pressure to keep the volume smaller than your whole house. A lot of energy is used to compress that gas. If you are not using a hazardous area rated compressor for hydrogen, you should expect, sooner or later, to have an explosion when a sufficient leak occurs.
You will spend far more money on this set up, than buying bottles of propane. Likely at least 10 times as much money and higher risk for the same amount of stored energy.
I have designed/installed/modified several industrial hydrogen compressor systems in refineries. I have the knowledge and tools to set up such a system for my home. I would never consider it a reasonable option both due to expense and risk.
I was planning for being able to turn the pump on and run it for about an hour, or 63 amps. I figured that would be long enough to run the pump and store water.
I would expect it to be 3 to 10 times less efficient than a properly sized generator running on the same gasoline. You are not going to be anywhere near the peak efficiency operating points in your vehicle to the load of the generator.
How much water are you going to store and how?
my pump has a pressure tank but I also have a 100 gallon tank that is not being used at the moment. My plan was to draw enough water, store it and enough time would pass so the batteries would be recharged before i needed to run the pump again
The issue is storing inconsistently generated kinetic energy from wind and solar.
There are risks. They can be abated. It’s being done successfully.
It’s expensive. Long run, less expensive than hooking wind farms up to the grid. Much less expensive.
Also less expensive than giant arrays of mirrors boiling a tower pot full of water to generate steam to turn turbines.
Don’t put this set up in the basement. That’s where the Thorium reactor goes.
How long of an outage, and how much water use do you want for that time?
I would think bladder tanks and check valves would be cheaper than the amount of batteries you need.
Just my 2¢
Storing energy from wind generators, through multiple systems that create loss, is cheaper than taking the energy directly from a wind farm to the gird?
No. But they are not comparing the same thing either.
Far more efficient method of energy storage than separating, compressing, storing then burning to regenerate via hydrogen is pumped storage on an existing hydro-generation dam. It is being done in several location for many decades.
A few thoughts:
Silicon solar chips don’t convert light well with light not striking at a 90 degree angle. Unless you have a solar tracking frame, you won’t get much more than 400 watt hours a day even on a clear day. With conversion losses, even less.
Even with deep cycle batteries, you don’t want a deep discharge, you will want double the batteries that you think you will need.
Well pumps draw a lot of amps when they start, you will need a very big inverter to run a pump.
When you need the power the most, winter, you will have the smallest power budget to work with.
You will need to replace the batteries regularly, if you draw them down frequently probably every year or two. If you baby them you may get 6 years.
There are solar calculators on the internet that can help you figure out how many panels and batteries you will need as well as size of inverter.
If you are serious about this, you probably want at lest part of your house wired to run of 12v, they makes lights and small appliances that run off 12v and would be more efficient than running the equivalent off the inverter.
There are more issues but there are web sites that have more help and information. Google will lead to weeks worth of reading.
bkmk
BFL - Reminder-(How many more panels do I need to get....)
Power usually goes off when it is stormy weather, so you would not have any solar power either.
I lived with solar power for several years and it does work good but the batteries i could afford did not last very long.
I used 8 to 10 deep cycle batteries from wall mart which did the job as long as they lasted, and used either a 3500 or 4000 inverter and had 3 80 watt and 2 50 watt panels.
On top of that i had a wind charger which might run a radio hooked to a 12 volt battery and also had a 12 volt diesel generator that i could run at night which was very inexpensive it was an old generator which was used on the state highway construction jobs to run their signs at night.
I had a propane refrigerator other wise i would have been in trouble.
I would advise a generator, but if you have already spent the money for the solar panel you can add to it and the batteries and make it work for a short time, good luck.
It’s true. The problem is building the dam.
I get what you are saying. I just think the battery thing is laughable.
I for one am not interested in Solar, but would rather be on the winning side of kicking greenies’ as-es, and going full ahead restoring our legitimate, proven energy resources.
google PTO generator.
Agreed. But there are a lot of existing dams, that could have the pump system added for no more acreage used up. It just requires maintaining sufficient flow downstream. It has been retrofitted to a few.
Outstanding idea. Here in the People’s Soviet of WA, we could do this all up and down the Columbia and Skagit.
No trouble with water in WA.
For a brief moment when power is applied the rotor is not turning and the amperage reaches LRA until the rotor starts rotating.
Ping for later info...
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