Thread: Solar Power

Ah, but think of those sunny days when the batteries are full and every appliance is running madly.

Must happen a couple of times a year.

Simon

Originally Posted by abaddonxi

Ah, but think of those sunny days when the batteries are full and every appliance is running madly.

Must happen a couple of times a year.

Simon

Yeah but no matter how nice the day we need the generator on that night

and between the diesel generator running the pool pump (this is not hooked up to our solar as it is too draining), and the petrol generator which is next to my bedroom window! i find nights rather frustrating!

that systems worth about 2000 watts and if your running the deep cycle batteries down all the time then they wont last long.....

any odds of putting most of the stuff on the grid and keeping the solar for things like lighting fanstv and computers?

Its a $30,000 dollar system and we were promised it would be able to run all that we would require and that it could hold enough power to last 10days without charge we got jibbed

8 panels I'm guessing say 80 Watts each ? so 640 Watts total generation capacity in full sun.( exluding wind power ) ?

What capacity do you have in your batteries ( in terms of total amp hours ) ?

Those systems need regular maintenance. ( not saying you don't with yours ). Many years ago, we were visiting some hippie friends who live in the bush - he was complaining his solar system ( about the same size as yours ) wasn't working properly. So I poked around with his multimeter. Turned out there was about a half volt drop between each battery because of gunk and corrosion on the terminals. We took all the batteries apart and cleaned all the terminals with baking soda solution - worked a treat after that. Ran all their lights, TV, and occassional power tools no probs.

Fascinating that you have to run a diesel generator to generate power to run an electric pump to filter the pool. For how many hours a day? I would be thinking of powering the pump another way.
I dare say that most of your appliances are still 240v. There are some great appliances that are built for the recreational market that will service your home more economically.
Regards
Glen

We run it three hours a day!

I think that your system is about half the size you need. My system has a total of twenty panels, sixteen on trackers and four fixed. It cost about the same as yours. It normally runs refrigerator, freezer, computer, TV, lights, power tools. For the first six months we had it installed we did not run the generator at all, and I think we only ran it about three times in the first year.

Since then, the trackers have failed (and the manufacturer no longer exists, and I can't even get circuit diagrams - and they filed the numbers off the ICs!) and my batteries are getting old, so I have to run the generator about once a week on average. You have to watch power useage - forget any heating device, except a microwave is OK because you don't use it for long, watch "standby" power use, no big TVs, get six star fridge and freezer, forget airconditioning.

Zulu Delta 534 - we looked at running low voltage appliances rather than 240v. In theory, you save on the conversion, and the appliances are generally more efficient. However, in practice, the low voltage appliances usually cost around double the price of the 240v one, and there are far fewer to choose from. A further complication is that for a house size system you are looking at 24 or probably 48volts (because there is a limit to the size of single cells you can manhandle, and you don't want to run cells in parallel if possible).

In our setup, the major drains are the fridge and freezer (and I recently bought a new fridge that uses less than half the power that the one bought fifteen years ago does). We have two identical 24v systems and inverters, one running the fridge and one the freezer, each with other bits of the house on them (for example, behind my computer desk there are two four way power points, one on each system, and I swap bits between them depending on how the useage on each system is going.

Hope this helps someone.

John