by admin | Feb 1, 2014 | Tech Updates
After a few months experimenting with solar energy generation in my spare time, I finally was able to start using the system to power up some of our lighting requirements. We have about seven CFL bulbs lighting our right of way and part of the perimeter fence at night. This is controlled by an optical switch that automaticall turns on the lights when it is evening and turns them off in the morning. I measured about 120W of power drawn from the battery for all the lights. Assuming the lights are on 12hours, I will be saving about 1.44kWhr per day or about 43.2kWhr per month. At Php8.5/kWhr, this amounts to Php367/month. This doesn’t seem much but this actually means that I only need to increase battery storage capacity and also solar panel generating capacity and I can increase my savings gradually until I get free electricity. My solar panel, after checking it again, actually has a capacity of 128W and not 100W as I mentioned before. This means I have only less than 10W reserved generating capacity to allow for cloudy days. So I will change some of the bulbs to a slightly lower power rating in order to keep the power consumption at about 80W. I also plan to add another set of batteries to make my total storage capacity of 400AH because during brownouts, I can also use the system to power up my network equipment that consumes about 230W. I can avoid using the generator if the power interruption is only for short periods. This is handy for night time power interruptions because the generator...
