In previous articles, we have been describing the use of LED Christmas lights as emergency off-grid lighting powered directly from a 24 volt battery array. The first article described using strings of cool white lights. Subsequent articles described building a test fixture for these and warm white lights to overcome problems with untested lights, and […]
In two previous articles, we discussed using LED Christmas lights as emergency lighting powered straight from an off-grid battery array, as well as a test fixture to sort individual lights for making a reliable DC-powered string from the random sampling of LEDs in a typical 110 volt string. Both of those articles focused on cool […]
In a previous article, we described the adaptation of LED Christmas lights as emergency solar lighting powered directly from an off-grid battery array. This approach provides many advantages versus running them from an inverter, including useful lighting while trying to fix your inverter. In that article we made some recommendations about string lengths, current and […]
As part of our off-grid solar series, we’re looking for bare-bones options for the charger and inverter components to meet the minimum requirements of driving a 70 watt freezer, 24/7 if possible. We recently tested a Bestek 300W Pure Sine 12V Inverter, shown to the right. Although this unit failed to drive the freezer, it […]
It’s Christmas season at the old school, and it is time to do something with those light strands. These days, LED light strands are cheap and ubiquitous. With a bit of judicious modification, we can use them as emergency lights directly off our off-grid battery array, no inverter required.
We’re ready to finally wrap up our series on the ground solar installation we used during Hurricane Matthew to keep our freezer and refrigerators cold. We’ll provide links to all the previous articles at the end of this post as a convenient reference. In this post, we talk about the wiring, connectors and tools used […]
We’ve been discussing our Hurricane Matthew ground solar installation (overview, combiner, charger and inverter), as well as fundamental solar panel principles and off-grid lead acid battery principles. This time, we will discuss the battery array used for this exercise, as well as the automotive DC safety breaker. Refer again to the photo of our inside […]
In previous articles here, here, and here, we’ve been discussing our off-grid solar power system we used during Hurricane Matthew. We also gave an overview of solar panel and lead-acid battery principles. While there is much more to discuss regarding batteries, including alternative battery technologies, let’s skip ahead to the inverter, which is the tip […]
We’ve been dedicating several posts to building an off-grid energy system with solar panels. Any off-grid energy system, especially solar, is best operated with batteries to store energy, unless you plan on making a generator available 24/7 to fill in the gaps. There are many available battery technologies, and eventually we’ll review many of these. […]
Saturday’s post about chargers mentioned that our sponsor SoftBaugh might be able to get pricing that would beat Amazon pricing for some items. Here are the latest quotes SoftBaugh is able to provide (in all cases, ground shipping to US locations is included): Midnite Solar Classic Lite 150 MPPT Charge Controller: SoftBaugh can offer this […]