A step towards Solartopia

So I know have a solar powered battery charging and laptop running set-up. This was on my todo list since a now former roommate of mine bought a solar panel. It was like a surreal christmas to find a cardboard box marked solar panel sitting in our living room. It turned out that the panel was also too big for his intended purpose and thus he traded it for rent and now the deCline house is trying to go off the grid.

A solar panel by itself isn't very useful because the voltage it produces vary widely (or so I'm told) and you need a few additional resources to build a solar system. These are a charge controller and a battery. The charge controller prevents you from frying your batteries because it cuts off the charge when the battery has reached max capacity. I ended up getting the cheapest one I could find a 30$ some odd bucks 7amp charge controller from Northern Tool. This didn't have the fancy Pulse Width Modulation that optimizes charging by not being either on or off but charging further, these were more expensive and I didn't feel like it was needed for my simple set-up. So that leaves the battery.

Just yesterday I decided after dropping Oscar off to go and find a battery from a local distributor. I fully recommend finding a place the retails industrial batteries because shipping on them is expensive. The one I found was a 26 amp hour sealed lead acid battery which means it doesn't need water added and is less likely to leak. Since I plan on using the system on a bike cart set-up on occasion and moving it about I didn't want to go for the cheaper sealed lead acid battery. Most batteries that you can purchase are made of out lead and acid, not very environmentally friendly but there are patents regarding the usage of Nickel Metal Hybrid or NiMh's in a large form factor owned by Chevron, so they are mostly only being used in certain hybrid cars and not available very widely in the market place. Enough of battery talk.

Now I have them all wired together - solar panel laying at a precarious angle on porch roof wired to charge controller, wired to battery. Now to use the energy I still have to convert it back to AC using a car style inverter. This is inefficient but not horribly so and cheaper than trying to find all 12 volt appliances. Just last night I lay the panel in the window way and started charging the battery. I'll have to take a picture of the set-up and post it, but I might not get around to that right away.

Anyways I charged the batteries from my digital camera and my cellphone off the system and I'm recharging the system right now so that I can try to not be so dependent upon the grid. Is it a worthwhile financial investment, hardly it'll take quite some time for it to pay for itself in electrical costs. I think I estimated 8.00 a year savings times the 20 year life of the solar panel equals 160$ in savings. The whole cost of the set-up was something along the lines of 300$ for the panel, 69$ for the battery and 30$ for the charge controller, I had the inverter lying around but they can run you about 40$ for a decent one as well. At the same time it does given one a sense of accomplishment to go off the grid if even just a little bit and who knows what will happen if the power were to go off etc, or if I want to set-up in a remote area I could still be engaging in my techno-wizardy.