RE: Solar Power System with Up-cycled Components Part 2
That's some cool problem solving @monikergnome.
My family lived in the Okavango Delta in Botswana back in 2000-2002.
We had both a 220V generator and 12V solar setup. There was a complex bit of switch flipping required when the generator was shutting off for the day- My dad only ran it for 4 hours at a time. If you got the switching order wrong you fried the inverter's switchboard thingy and everyone was cast into darkness. Oh well.
We had a 12v chest freezer that had it's own dedicated battery ( if I remember correctly. This was 18 years ago lol) I think we had a gas fridge. And we could run our 3 computers and lights off of the 12v inverter pack for a couple of hours. My older sister and I were homeschooled on computers and my younger brother and sister were quite little so my mom tought them using the normal school books.
Lol, in a way we were off-grid hipsters. We were doing it before it was mainstream :D
The technology has come far in the last 20 years. All the best with your setup as you test the boundaries of its power. Literally :-)
Thank you. I have a thermostatically controlled relay and was thinking about seeing if I could turn a small chest freezer into a low power refrigerator. I was looking at propane fridges but I was always wondering how well they actually worked. I would love to go completely off the grid but I don't think that is possible for my family at the moment. :)
Look into peltier modules. They cool with no moving parts. The ice chests that plug into a car runs on them.