What can you run on 100 watts of solar power!!!! (BEST EXPLANATION EVER)

what's going on guys going to uh explain a little better you know how solar Works seems like a lot of people are confused and it is confusing it's a it's a complicated thing you know if you don't have like an electrical engineering degree it's going to be something that's hard to understand but I'm going to try my best to break it down a little easier I did another video of what you can run on 100 watts and I did my best to explain it but let me see if I can do a little better to explain to you how how all this stuff works with solar panels okay so uh what you're going to start out with say like me you just wanted to get your feet wet you just wanted to jump in and kind of figure out you know what you can do and what you can't do because for me anyway is a little hard to understand a lot of these YouTube videos of what they're trying to say you know and trying to figure it out you know if it sounds too good or then it actually is or if it's actually what they're saying it is so with my system and on the first video that I made to explain it I had one 100 wat panel Renegy okay and uh my battery bank so what we'll do is we'll start with the with the uh solar panel and I'll explain that so I'm going to write the stuff out for you all too that way it' be a little easier to see all right so we're going to start with one 100 wat panel and that's what it's rated for okay so depending on where you're located at I'm on the Eastern Seaboard so we get about 4 and 1/2 hours 5 hours of peak sunlight okay you're going to get a little bit of energy beforehand and maybe a little bit more in the afternoon but most calculations are done off of that so I'm going to say sorry my hands are wet my panel at Max gets 80 watts an hour that's the best that it's going to do it's not going to do the 100 watt so if you're calculating your calculations up off of what the rating is on the panel that's not going to work you're going to come up short you've got to have loss so right off the bat from the sunlight hitting from the sunlight hitting the panel you're going to lose 20 watts at Max with full sunlight okay so you're going to lose 20 watts there so then what I'm going to do just for purposes of trying to explain this we're going to take 80 watts and times that about five 5 hours okay so 80 Watts for 5 hours so 80 five times it's down there is the other 80 gives us 400 watts that that panel is going to produce per day pel gives me 400 watts okay per day okay of energy so that's important number right there okay that's something you need to remember when you're making your calculations of how many how many panels you're going to use so let's just say uh we'll write that up on top so 400 watts is what we got to play with on that one panel we'll leave it down here at the bottom okay so let's say I don't know what you want to do if you're want to do the off- Grid or if you're want to pump power back back into your system at your house but let's just say you're going to do an off-grid setup and you just want something cheap and simple say you want one light and uh you know TV and uh DVD player okay just just for an example we're going to do a smaller TV we're going to do like a fluorescent bulb something that's low wattage okay and then the just a small plain D DVD player not high de or anything just for these calculations so for the TV we're going to say that it uses 50 wats a hour DVD player let's just say I don't know 30 that's probably pretty reasonable Watts a hour and the light a fluorescent light bulb should uh should use about 15 watts you know for the lower wattage ones so we'll say 15 watts a hour okay so we got a TV DVD player and the light okay now this is how you're going to do your calculations you're going to look up on a lot of times on the back of your device it will tell you the wattage per hour or an easy way of calculating that is to take amps amps times volts okay so if you get on the back of your TV and it's 100 let's just say 110 volts and it's let's just say 1 amp 1 amp okay so you times these two together 1 * 100 110 is 110 Watts so it would use 110 Watts a hour that's how that's one important thing you got to remember a hour okay so remember that calculation that's uh will help you a whole lot in all the solar panel stuff okay so by that calculation the TV would use 50 WS an hour DVD 30 W light 15 watts a hour okay so let's just say you're going to be over at your cabin for 3 hours and you have children or something that you know your reason being you have the TV and dv player to keep them busy or something and let them watch cartoons while you're you know doing whatever you want to do okay so we will to take 3 hours 3 hours times all of this added up and you can do this differently say you know you wanted to run the light for 3 hours you take the 15 * 3 say you only use the DVD and the TV 1 hour then you just times those two by one a piece and then add the total of so you can plug and play stuff here okay so we'll go 3 hours uh time 95 I don't know if that's right or not my calculations ain't very good or hang on that's five yeah okay sorry guys you got to bear with me a little bit here all right so that's 265 265 Watts that you needed for that day okay so with this count calculation these things you wanted to run for 3 hours you'd have 265 Watt hours or Watts I'll get into the wat hours here in a minute Watts okay so by that one 100 watt panel with 400 watts you have plenty of power to run those things for three hours okay so this is how you do your calculation you take your total that your solar panel is going to use and you minus that usage okay so okay gives you 145 Watts left there we go right there 145 Watts that your panel overproduced okay but now let me right over here now this is where a uh solar system gets a little complicated so remember this stuff okay this is important so pause it back up you want to remember this stuff okay let me erase it okay so this is where your calculations are going to be a little tricky and this is where most people get a little flush and it took me a while to figure it out okay so we okay so starting out most people's solar panel systems are going to be a 12vt system now somebody that does a lot of research they might invest a little bit more money and you know do a higher voltage system so there's a couple different size systems there's 12vt 24v and 48 volt okay this all has to to do with how your solar panels are hooked up and the size of your inverter and the size of your battery bank but just for this little demonstration we're going to say that you're starting out with 12vt system because it's cheaper and easier to start okay so your solar panel is producing that 400 watts at 12 volts okay so your inverter will take that 400 Wat SPS that your solar panel produced for the day and take that into your battery Bank as 12 volts okay once it gets into your battery bank then your inverter will take that from your battery and con invert that into 110 volt so your appliances and things can use the power and your inverter has a loss from that so when you take the 400 wats and it it's 12vt and invert it to 110 volts you're losing energy there okay the inverter has a natural energy loss you know from heat from all kinds of different things so depending on what size inverter you have it seems like the the bigger inverter you have the the more of a loss there is because it's inverting so much more energy and you and the heat produced they have to have more fans on them to keep them cool from overheating okay so my inverter that I have you if you look at my other videos you'll see I usually have a 30 to 40 wat lossage just from inverting it over okay so that 145 you got to go ahead and minus 30 off of that loss on the inverter let's put a w there w means w okay now also the same thing with inverter is the lines that you're hooking up from the solar panel depending on the distance if it's close to your battery Bank you're not really going to lose a whole lot unless you have a lot of power coming through the lines and they're too small but you have to have a certain size gauge of wire the bigger you go the less loss there is so you're going to lose some wattage on the lines coming to the battery bank and from the battery Bank to the inverter not So Much from the battery Bank to the inverter as long as they're close you know most people put them right next to each other so it's really not a loss unless that's really little line and you're trying to pull a lot through it okay but we won't we won't go into those losses cuz that's that's so over the board depending on on you know your inverter and your battery bank and the size gauge of your wire and the distances there's a whole lot of calculations in that but you're not really going to lose a whole lot unless you know you go 100t from your house and put a solar panel and then come back and put your battery Bank you know in your house or something and then put your inverter on the other end of the house then you're going to have a big loss but if you just do like you know your shed or something or or cabin and you're putting solar panel into the house 10 15 ft to your battery bank and then your inverter is right there you're not really going to lose that much okay so the next thing is your battery Bank okay so let's just say you bought a 12vt deep cycle battery and say it's 110 amp hours 110 amp hours at 12vt deep deep battery battery did I write that wrong sure did battery okay so uh this is where amp Hours come into play okay so owers can be they can be complicated on their own you know what your trying to figure out is uh how much you have to play how much wattage so you have to convert this 110 amp hours into something that you can understand so uh solar panels is wattage okay your devices are wattage your inverters are based on wattage everything's based on wattage so to get this to where you can understand it it's the same same uh equation that we we did earlier amps time Watts okay and that's all this is where it says amp that's that's your amperage of your battery it's 110 amp at 12 Vol so we take 12 V time 110 amp hours okay so 110 * 12 that gives us uh let's see what is that let's just I don't know if it's right but let's just say 1 12200 1,00 watt wat hours okay so that's how much storing power your battery has okay so uh solar panels only produce on sunny days and that what I was telling you on that other calculation the 80 Watts that's the no clouds in the sky bright and sunny and any of you all that have ever had solar panels before that doesn't always happen so you know you're going to get less energy so if this system is something that you're going to use like on a daily basis you have to really look for this if if you're going to just come out to your property you know once a week you know or something where your batteries have all week to charge up before you're going to come back it's not really too big of a deal unless you're going to use a lot of energy when you get there so this is the the little equation here so I forgot how much we said we were going to use let's just say 300 we're going to use 300 watts while we're at our cabin okay for the day okay and our panels are only putting in uh what do we say 245 and then after the losses let's just say 200 wats Surplus for the day okay so we're we're using 300 watts or we're producing uh 300 watts a day uh confused myself we're producing 300 watts for the day and let's just say we're going to use 200 okay so what you have to do is you have to this is your batteries at full charge so you have to minus this for every days of use okay and after you minus it if you have a good day we're going to add the 300 so you're back up to full charge now let's say we had a a cloudy day and we didn't get we didn't get that whoop we didn't get that 300 watts we didn't get anything for that day so say we had two cloudy days so you take 200 minus 12200 will give you a th000 and then the next day you take another 200 minus the th000 will give you 800 watts okay so see how it's get gets a little tricky you have to keep this number up so for deep cycle batteries you don't want to drain them past the 50% mark because once you do that you start damaging your batteries they won't well not necessarily damaging them unless you get them too low but the uh amount of times that you can charge them back up and discharge them starts dropping so if you keep them above 50% you can charge them and uh use the stored energy more times okay most people will even get them down to 60% I always drop mine down to 50 because it doesn't really give you much energy unless you got a lot of money to buy a lot of uh batteries but you know I don't so you have to keep that in mind for your calculations so you want to factor in cloudy days and sunny days so if I was going to use 300 wats a day and I had one battery one 12vt 110 amp hour battery and I was using that 200 WS a day and I was going to be out there every single day I would probably get another 100 wat panel okay so it would double your amount that's coming in so say just like that while ago you had two cloudy days and you got down to 800 watts okay you're still using that 200 for that day that you're getting in that's Sunny that you're getting your 300 watts coming in but you're already down to eight okay so minus your 200 off the 8 now you're down to six add your wattage for the day now you're back up to 9 now say you have another two days of clouds now it's going to drop you back down to 7 for the first day back down to five for the second day now see right there you're below the 50% Mark if you had another cloudy day you don't have anything but if you had two 100 W panels pumping in so you're going to double this 300 to 600 watts for the day so let's go back let's say we're down to the 800 watts and you have one sunny day you minus your 200 for the next day that gives you your 600 wats available on your batteries you had one sunny day you add that in now you're back to full charge say you had two more cloudy days you're fine you've had power so this is how you want to calculate your solar panels how many you need how much wattages because you want to make sure you have enough power for whatever you need it for you want to be more than what you need that way if uh you use you know that's just a uh a brief thing say say you got to you know everybody has uh cell phones kids have tablets you know iPads iPhones all all these little things game systems you know all those things when you're off grid they use power you know just charging your phone my little iPhone 5 here uses like 40 WTS to charge so you have to factor that stuff Ino you know even if you're just have a little offgrid cabin or even a shed out somewhere on property that you don't have any electric on you have to calculate those little things in the miscellaneous I usually depending on what I have you know if if it's just little phones and stuff I'll calculate in for the day when I'm doing my calculations of how much power I need you know 50 Watts for 2 or 3 hours that way this phone takes 30 minutes 40 minutes to charge up I want to plug somebody else's phone up or t tablet or whatever I've done those calculations for that or laptop laptops uses less energy to charge than this thing so I can plug all that stuff in and I'll know so hope this explained it a little better and uh I mean there's there's so much more to it I have uh I've made some other videos to try to explain it I hope this one's a a little better and uh helps you all out you know if if for you all that are the and you people know who you are if you're the sticklers for you know saying something wrong or spelled something wrong or math was a little wrong go somewhere else that's all I'm going to say sorry this is for people that want to figure out how to do this stuff I'm not the smartest guy I'm not the expert in this stuff I'm just doing my best to explain it to you all that way you got a little better idea of how this stuff works okay I'm not you know big Gizmo electrical engineer guy going to write it all big scientific out for you so hope it helps yall subscribe like let me know what you all think thanks

Channel: Simple Homestead

Views: 961,849

Keywords: solar, solar power, renogy, battery bank, offgrid, off grid, cabin, off grid cabin, off grid shed, solar panel, 100 watts, 100w, 100 watt solar panel

Id: -r-Tby8A_AY

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2016