Added solar power to our tractor storage building (pic heavy!)

PRCWI · Nov 7, 2016

Well my brother in law wired up the lights to the battery this weekend, amazon goofed my order so we are still waiting for parts to connect to the solar panel

Pretty happy with the light over the stalls thought I may add another 6 lights over the other half. The solar panel and Battery can handle it no sweat, next weekend I'll get pictures after we get the solar panel up and hooked up to the battery and charger.

nikdfish · Nov 7, 2016

Looking good! I was impressed with the amount of light the 10 watt floods put out that are up on the outside of our building.

Nick

PRCWI · Nov 12, 2016

Finally got the connectors so I could hook up the solar panel

PRCWI · Nov 13, 2016

So the 12.9 reading was late afternoon when the sun was almost set.

At 10am getting 13.7-8v. I could probably get better if I angled the panel but it's going to have plenty of juice to keep the battery charged. So far so good with my first venture into solar.

thanks for the help and advice!

k0ua · Nov 13, 2016

nikdfish said:
Looking good! I was impressed with the amount of light the 10 watt floods put out that are up on the outside of our building.

Nick

Nick, are charging results keeping up with all of your load requirements? Now that you have had and used the system for a while. And do you think there is any chance you could go negative in the cold dark cloudy days ahead? Or will you still have enough reserve to get through until the next sunny positive day?

nikdfish · Nov 13, 2016

No problems to date. The system has a lot more watt hrs available than I am using or that the battery can absorb. The battery status LED is typically showing the slow flash for float charge before the end of the day. Since the exterior floods are motion sensor controlled, there is virtually no drain unless there is activity in their range and I don't use the interior lights much at all. The battery is a 105 AH deep cycle, so full charge is probably good for close to 20 hrs of interior light use. With current use levels, that is plenty for multiple weeks of my typical use before getting it down to an "undervoltage" state even considering self discharge.

Nick

k0ua · Nov 13, 2016

nikdfish said:
No problems to date. The system has a lot more watt hrs available than I am using or that the battery can absorb. The battery status LED is typically showing the slow flash for float charge before the end of the day. Since the exterior floods are motion sensor controlled, there is virtually no drain unless there is activity in their range and I don't use the interior lights much at all. The battery is a 105 AH deep cycle, so full charge is probably good for close to 20 hrs of interior light use. With current use levels, that is plenty for multiple weeks of my typical use before getting it down to an "undervoltage" state even considering self discharge.

Nick

Sounds good. It looks like you could but a 2 meter rig out there too!

Garandman · Nov 14, 2016

nikdfish said:
No problems to date. The system has a lot more watt hrs available than I am using or that the battery can absorb. //

Darn!

Since you did such a nice job, I was going to vote for adding a single or dual axis tracking system for the panel, jus tto see what you came up with!

I'd guess they only really pay if a utility is buying your output and has a premium during peak demand times.

nikdfish · Nov 25, 2016

Lights for the Christmas season

The wife asked if the solar charge setup in the equipment shed could support a set of Christmas lights. I took a look at the watts drawn by a small (200w) inverter and a timer, with a few strings of LED indoor/outdoor lights. The whole package looks to draw about 11 - 12 watts. We didn't have an appropriate tree, so I just set up a pole about 4' high & ran cord down to 8 stakes around the base. The lights were draped around the form & zip tied where needed.

This is what it looks like

The timer runs the lights from roughly 5:30PM - 12AM, so about 6.5 hours a night, in the vicinity of 70 watt-hours. I'll post back after a night or two's use/next day charge to report on how things balance. (for perspective, the 105 amp/hour deep cycle battery represents about 1260 watt-hours)

Nick