Quackington Haven Solar Generator

(Click pictures to enlarge)

As mentioned else where, Quackington haven has no mains electricity, and as our local power company wanted a small fortune to connect us we decided the money would be better spent in a sustainable way. So we set about building our own solar generator.

After much research and calculation of how much power we were going to need I found the necessary components and set about putting it all together.

Working out how much power we use was the tricky part. Essentially we run a pond pump and UV bulb for 15 minutes in the hour which adds up to 6 hours a day. The pump and bulb (florescent) use a combined wattage of about 84W. It is a 12V system. Bearing in mind we live in the UK so sunshine is not always guaranteed, whatever the time of year, we needed a fair bit of spare storage capacity. So 84W/12V = 7 So we use about 7Amps per hour for 6 hours or 42Amp hours per day. (We also occasionally run power tools from the system).

We have 2 x 285W solar panels connected in series, so in theory with no inefficiencies we have 570W/12V giving us 47.5amps of charge per hour. (Realistically we can easily knock 20+% off this.) This power is used to charge 3 110 Amp hour leisure batteries.

The solar panels are connected to a charge controller (2) after passing through a circuit breaker(1). There is a DC power outlet that is connected to a switch (3). The Charge Controller (2) connects to the leisure batteries via another circuit breaker (4) where it charges the 3 110Ah leisure batteries, which are joined in parallel. Connected to the battery bank via a fuse is the inverter (5) which converts the DC power supplied by the batteries into AC for general use. (Essentially mains electric).

The bank of batteries from full charge, in theory (again) should run the system for about 7 days with no recharge.

As you can see we have built a lot of spare capacity into the system. We have done this for good reason. In winter here, it is not uncommon to get only one or two chargeable hours of sunshine a day, some days we probably do not get any. We also as mentioned sometimes run power tools, usually when building housing for the birds.

The beauty of the system is once set up it is free to run and carbon neutral. We can also easily add to it if we need more capacity. It was also cheaper to install then getting mains connected.

The whole system is a bit "Heath Robinson" but so far it has worked very well. Please don't take my calculations too seriously, I am no electrician or mathematician.