Solar Power for remote panel

Bullzi

Lifetime Supporting Member
Join Date
Jun 2012
Location
Colorado
Posts
1,530
Happy Monday to everyone,

I have posted a few post lately regarding Click PLC, Soil Moisture Probe and Cell Modems. Now I am trying to power this combo using a Solar Panel and Batteries.

Seen a lot of them in the field but have never been involved with the engineering of a panel with Solar Power.
Any advice you can give? Looking for what brands of panels you have used, batteries and other equipment. What lessons you have learned so I dont have to repeat mistakes. Just about anything you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!
 
Bigger the better....

I dont have anything with a PLC but I do have several gates that have battery operated openers and use solar panels to keep the batteries charged, I replaced everything with larger panels and larger batteries
 
Even with sealed lead acid batteries, it is best to have them in a separate box. The gases still can cause corrosion if they're packed in a small enclosure with your electronics. We often use a marine battery box with flexible conduit for battery backup systems.

I agree with Mark about the panel size. It can be tricky to calculate what you will really need. We do more backups and few solar. Most of the time, what I see listed for power consumption for the devices we use is worse case conditions. I have built panels that should draw 2-3 amps, and can only measure a fraction of an amp while running, but I still err on the side of caution.

I had a 100AH battery keep a ML1400, Maxon radio modem, Red Lion G304k2 and handful of relays working for a week because someone forgot to turn the breaker back on after a repair. :whistle:

The few solar systems we have done were more or less outsourced to a guy who supplies some of our equipment, and he knows what it takes to run his stuff based on actual practice.
http://www.datadeliverydevices.com/solar-power-accessories
 
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Figure out how many days without any sun you would like your panel to stay on for and then size the battery bank appropriately. When it is a nice sunny day probably the next day will be too so you will get multiple days of solid charging in a row. When it is a dark cloudy stormy day with poor solar charging probably the next day will be too and the batteries will get lower and lower day by day. Depends on your weather but a good storm system where I last did solar powered controls lasted 5 days and we would get basically no charge with 2 100 watt panels.


It is all about the batteries.


you can get a ****ty wind turbine from china for about $300 which can provide a lot of charge when those storms blow through though.
 
Also not a bad idea to add a battery meter, if you have a radio added to the mix like Paul you can send a low battery alarm and if you use Maxon I have the cables :)
 
I've used calculators like this in the past. Plug in your expected load, days without sun, etc. and it will spit out the size panels and batteries you need. I generally added some margin (+20% or so) as I always found real-world installations were never quite what I had planned.

Make sure you use large enough wire. You get a larger voltage drop at 12 or 24VDC than at 120VAC. If you have a longer distance between the panel and charge controller or charge controller and batteries, upsize as much as is practical. And insulate your battery box. Batteries hate the cold.
 
We have a remote solar panel using Prosoft RLX2-IHG Radiolinx radios. Found out, the hard way, that those radios don't restart automatically if they didn't power down gracefully. IOW if the batteries run down then someone has to manually reboot the radios once the batteries are recharged.

We are working on a solution before the winter weather hits this year but wanted to pass along this caveat in case your radios behave the same.
 

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