Questions on cheap solar electricity system

Hi. We're partially on solar -- 12V and 110V -- and I'm new at this but it doesn't sound like your energy requirements are very much. You can't overflow a battery so don't worry about that. I'm not sure how much energy your fountain would take so I don't know what to say about your input.

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:

I am familiar with Home Despot;

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I like that one! [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]

I wouldn't put a lot of money into solar panels without taking a look at where things are with the discovery that electricity can be generated by the infra red end of the spectrum. Depending on if this becomes marketable and when it becomes marketable, it might render the conventional solar panels obsolete very quickly.

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Power lines lose quite a bit of energy. The hum is energy being lost. Power lines also heat up and this loses more energy. Add repair in a bad winter too!

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I think the estimate of loss over lines is anwhere from 5 to 10%. Add to that the loss of waste heat from remote fuel burning generating stations, and it becomes apparent that substantial savings could be had by having inner city natural gas generating plants, as Toronto is building.

Crappy Tire is selling kits now for your house. I think I did a quick mental estimate and found you could go off grid for maybe ten grand or so, maybe less.

On the other hand, the wind end of the generation system isn't efficient if you live in a place like I do, where buildings and trees create turbulance and reduce wind velocity.

Farms, and people who live on the edges of cities might find it feasable though.

As for the fountain idea, doesn't one need a power inverter somewhere in the mix?

Electrical stuff isn't my strong suit.

Try TSC or any other farm equipment dealer. Solar/battery pumps are used to bring water from creeks/rivers when they are fenced off for environmental reasons.

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Out here, we call it Crappy Tire. Never heard the name WalFart before.

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Saw a bumper sticker referring to "Mall Wart" today.

That new $8.5 billion hydro project north of Havre St. Pierre - they're building a huge shopping mall complex just to accomodate the influx of workers expected.

Brian, today I checked the power requirements of my small 12 volt bilge pump. It needed 12 watts, so it is quiet likely that your 5 watt solar panel will be somewhat underpowered to drive your pump directly.

I am kind of curious how you wash your clay soil to separate the silt from the clay. What effect does the silt have on the cob construction?

That's interesting indeed, Boom Boom.   Consider, too that when those first panels were amortized based on a 20 year life span, appliances and such were less efficient, meaning you'd need more of them.    Although, maybe that's a saw off-- I note that new T.V.'s for example consume hellishly more power than the old cathode ray tube.  I wouldn't have thought that, but there you go.

Seems as some appliances get more efficient, we are treated with new toys that take up that savings, and perhaps more to boot.

On the conservation side, I've started to notice LED light bulbs for sale at the local hardware stores.  They claim a lifespan of twenty years, although the first ones I saw at Home Hardware were only waranteed for two years.   But, amortizing the cost of the bulb, about $15 dollars, just on bulb  cost alone it's cheaper, without considering the 90% energy savings.

Unfortunately, the lumens on a 40 watt bulb (I have several places in the house where 40 watt is sufficient for our purposes)  is rated at 300 for an incandescent.   The lumens on an equivelent LED bulb is only 100, and it's that ethereal full moon texture of light.   Which, again, has some utility in certain applications, but isn't good, for over your kitchen sink where you wash dishes.

I'm guessing that in your location, wind is plentiful.   It seems to me that you could bodge together your own windmill, bringing down the price.   If I lived where you did, it's something I'd try-- but not before boning up on electrical stuff first.   My niece and nephew live out of town, on five acres and the wind always blows there.   I know it's not quite this simple, but if one were to find an old industrial fan, an alternator and an old electric base board heater, one might be able to offset the heat loss one experiences due to winter wind, without much capital outlay.  My nephew has the tinkering skills and all the tools one might need and more.

And, even if it doesn't work, you'd learn stuff in the attempt that could come in handy applied elsewhere.

Everything in life is an experiment.

hmmm.  One could even build a model first.....

I think that's one of the bagaboos about do it yourself projects and retail kits, in that it's difficult if not impossible to have a windmill that can be efficient at low speeds and one that can operate-- or just withstand-- peak wind speeds.    Some use a break, some a clutch system.  

In my niece and nephew's situation, I would first research the kind of typical wind velocities associated with storms that come out of the northwest here in winter, because that's the cause of the heat loss you want to offset with your simple windmill.  

If one were to go whole hog though, I guess you'd need a number of them to take advantage of low and high winds.   Now you start to talk a bit of money.

I saw a simple windmill model kit I wanted to build with Snarfy the Wonder Girl on line, and the first thing that struck me was that I'd have to do something outside the instructions to anchor the base.

Thinking about that, that was some time ago, and other things pushed that out of my head..... but at the time, I was asking questions about it at work, with some of the electricians.    The model called for a toy motor used as a generator, wired backwards.  I was thinking that a motor, not being designed as a generator, wouldn't be that efficient, not compared with say, a small dynamo.   They saw it like I did, but not so much from experience but from theory. 

I left the idea off at the dynamo point.   I have a few wind-up flashlights, and while I am loathe to canabalize one, maybe tomorrow I will get a cheapy and take it apart.  The thing about dynamos though, is that they seem to take more energy to crank than a motor.

We were talking about wind turbines on another thread, dang if I can remember the name of the thread!

As for anchoring a windmill in areas of high wind, you'd also have to anchor down well solar panels for the same reason. Don't want a flying solar panel to crash through a nieghbour's window!

Quite a while ago I heard a story on CBC radio about some guys who accidentally discovered an electron flow on a plastic substance when it was hit with infra red light.   As we all know, our solar panels only work in the visible spectrum of light, and miss most of the energy from the sun that hits the earth.

Infra red panels would change everything.  The substance they are made from are significantly cheaper than current solar panels.

I did some googling, because I hadn't heard a thing about this in a couple of years.  In fact, I wondered if it was a hoax. It's not a hoax, but it's still in the developmental stage.

But, I'd hate to spend a bundle on current technology if this stuff ends up hitting the market in the next decade.... if it ever does hit the market.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/02/infrared-solar-panels-even-work-at-ni...

While we wait for advances in solar electric,  it's probably good to know that as far as harnessing energy from the sun, solar to heat is for the time being, more efficient-- although Boom Boom's revelations about photo voltaic cells lasting ten years or more longer may impact this.

I heard an interview with a guy on CBC radio who was into alternative energy as a hobby-- he said you better have money to indulge in such a thing-- and he said that solar to heat was economically efficient, but photo cells weren't, and were probably the biggest capital drain that wouldn't have a pay back.

That, of course, depends on geography a lot.   Where Boom Boom is, I imagine there's a lot of overcast days where your solar panel would still glean some energy, but you'd be hard pressed to harness any heat.  

I think I prattled on about this before, but it seems to me that at my lattitude, a solar heating device that had mirrors to amplify the sunshine should work quite well.   A computerized tracking system and motor isn't the stuff of science fiction anymore, either, I think stuff like that is "trailling edge technology"  now.

Trailing edge technology is the best.

One clever idea for "storing PV energy" from summer when there is excess sunlight to winter where there is not enough, is to use the excess summer PV energy to pump water uphill to a storage site like a lake, and then let it run down through a generator in winter.

As for your water pump Brian, I think that is great to experiment with PV systems as a way to get used to working with real and practical applications. The pump [which is DC, right?] should have a wattage rating on it, and the battery is 12 V so you should be able to calculate the power needs and supply that way.  EG 12V X 5 amps = 60 watts.

Solar is useless here during the winter months (November - March) because there's so little sun here; but lots of wind, so a windmill makes a lot of sense. When I get my renovations done (still another year to go) I'll look at both solar and wind power. By then I expect prices of each to drop through the floor.

Scott McWhinnie wrote:

I do have some math somewhere to simply calculate capacity and requirements. When I unearth it I will post it if it is the will of the babble

I'm at least a year away from investing in alternative energy sources because of all the expensive renovations I got going on (expensive for me, anyway) but I think I'll be fascinated by anything you could share with us here, Scott,

There are plenty of on line calculators for solar. It's wise to run your numbers through 2 or 3. Here is the best written breakdown I have found.

Your panel's potential: panel in watts x hours of sun x .085 (a constant) = Watt hours

eg 10W x 4h x 0.85 = 34Wh

Power Consumption: Watts x hours = Watt hours ...  but the battery is in amp hours (Ah!)

So to convert any which way we use variations of PIE - Power = Amps x Energy (volts)....

Watt hours = Amp hours x battery volts

of course there are a lot of variables thrown in to consider the key being how much sun is the panel really getting etc

I have had a hand in building two systems, one dc and one ac, and this math got us through.