Wednesday, 14 May 2025

A Little Solar Project

As we all know, solar panels are wonderful things, despite the fact that we have to wait about 10 years before they have given back all the energy used in making them.   Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

But I need some electricity down by my veg patch, mostly to power a watering pump, but I can use it for other things as well.   Getting a full power mains cable there would be a nightmare, so I decided to try a little solar project.   For less than €350 I got the bits for this installation that gives me just over one kWh of battery storage, plus whatever the sun is providing at the time.   I could probably just use bigger batteries for more power if I needed it.


I'm keeping the wires long since we might be selling up and I don't know where I will be installing this sytem in future.




2 comments:

microdave said...

Just bear in mind that resistance is the enemy of any power generating and distribution system. I appreciate that you might want to move this system elsewhere, but consider using shorter cables if you can. If you have access to a basic digital multimeter, you could try measuring the voltage drop on each lead when the panels are facing the midday sun. Even half a volt (500mV) will make a difference...

Mark In Mayenne said...

Hi Microdave, you are of course right. And I have plenty of wire so if it looks like this installation will be here for a while I will tidy things up a bit. The max charging current seems to be a couple of amps while the batteries are close to full. I don't yet have the pump I will be using but it will consume 200W at 24V so I will connect it directly to the battery with a short length of thick wire.

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