Back up power update
Thanks for all the useful
comments on my Harbor
Freight solar panel post. I need to learn more about MPPT charge
controllers.
I especially liked Harry's
idea of charging up our two best 6 volt golf cart batteries with a 120
volt battery charger.
The next test will be to see
how long my 12
volt fan will run on a full charge.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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We have something similar for our backup but with car batteries. We leave it on a smart charger so when the power goes out it will be charged and ready. We use one battery and an 800 Watt inverter to run our refrigerator (it will only run it for about an hour but usually that's enough to keep things cold for another 4 hours). We also have a separate battery with a much smaller inverter (175 watts) for running a fan at night. I would assume your batteries and 12 volt fan would be way more efficient than ours running through an inverter. Our setup lasts about 24 hours before the inverter shuts off due to low voltage. The third battery we have is just a spare. In an extended outage we just "jump" the battery off of our car for about 20 minutes to get the charge back up.
Here's a photo in our recent storm that knocked our power out for 3 days: https://www.flickr.com/photos/20378685@N00/34624995300/in/dateposted/
That looks like an interesting product?
I did not see a price....how much do you thing they are?