Solar Power in the Chicken House

Quote:
I am no professional, but my understanding is that even the deep cycle batteries are only marginally better than car batteries when it comes to solar applications. The best case scenario would be a bank of batteries from a forklift, or a golf cart. Being as these are expensive and hard to come by I think one of the deep cycle marine batteries is going to be your best bet, go for as many amp hours as you can get / afford.

take a look at this
http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_battery.html

then this
http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_battery_compare.html

ya... there are different 'grades' of deep cycle batteries. A marine deep-cycle battery is still designed to have high amp-draw capability to start a marine engine. For a really high-grade deep cycle battery, you need to look at forklift batteries, golfcart batteries, or solar-specific batteries.

Very good ideas !

Scott, I would go with a used car battery to begin with. I hope I am wrong, but I suspect you are going to destroy your first battery before you get your kinks ironed out. I would save the $300 battery until you get it all worked out first.

Quote:
Good idea. I happen to have a spare lawn mower battery and an older marine battery. I am already looking for a larger panel. Think I should go 60w?

I have not read quite all the umpty pages of this thread, for which I apologize, but:

Scott, since your main purpose seems to be keeping water liquid in winter, and maybe running a fan in summer, have you considered that you may not NEED batteries or controller or etc at all, just hook your solar panel directly up to the appliance?

Before you say that won't work, hear me out:

This is quite logical for a summertime fan, as it is more or less true that the need for a fan occurs at the same time as the supply of sunlight to run it.

For wintertime, though, it is ALSO still logical, if you use water to store your heat. Someone on another thread raised the interesting possibility of using a relatively low-wattage (low amp) heater; with the heater in a sealed container of water on which your actual chicken waterer sits, and adequate insulation on both (and even with a battery-powered conventional waterer heater, you would still be well advised to insulate the bejeebers out of it) it seems to me that this is actually quite likely to keep water liquid in fairly cold conditions, with a minimum of equipment. The solar panel would run the aquarium heater (or sealed lightbulb, or whatever) all day, to get the reservoir water temperature up as much as possible, to carry it over the night til the sun comes up the next day. In spells of cloudy weather you might have to manually refill the reservoir with hot water from the house; but note that the coldest winter weather is usually *sunny*, which helps somewhat.

The only potential difficulty I could see is that you would need to experiment to make sure that things were sized appropriately that you did not boil or melt the reservoir container on a long sunny day in late winter , but that should be pretty easily avoidable.

BTW I think it is rather odd that BYC is so full of schemes for *heating* water, and so almost completely barren of schemes for *insulating* waterers. I'm doing a bit of experimentation with the latter myself at the moment, but, why isn't everyone ELSE?

Just a thought,

Pat

Quote:
Good idea. I happen to have a spare lawn mower battery and an older marine battery. I am already looking for a larger panel. Think I should go 60w?

I think 60w will get you more where you are going to need to be, but I also think that capacity is going to be the biggest hurdle. To get any kind of life out of your battery at all you are going to have to keep from discharging them any more than 20% at any time, if you discharge more than 20% you begin doing perminant damage to your battery. we can figure about how much power your little heat strip is going to draw in worst case scenario (running all night)

5 watts at 12 v = .41 amps

this says you get about 10 hours of daylight at this time of year
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=605

of those 10 hours you will probably only get 8 usable hours of solar power on a good day

that tells me you have about 16 hours of dark with no power per day, so

16 hours at .41 amps per hour = +/- 6.5 amp hours

you can count on an approximate 15% loss in power from the process of charging and discharging your battery so we will call it 7.5 amp hours

your battery would need to be at the minimum 37.5 amp hours which should be easy to get

now, the next question will those 8 hours of sun be enough to charge your battery enough to run all night.

with your current 20w panel you might be using 5watts on your heat strip, so we can only count on 15 watts, since you will RARELY actually get 20 watts I suspect you will really only be getting 15 watts out of your panel and using 5 watts so you might have 10w during daylight on a clear day.

so, 10w at 12v = .83 amps

.83 amps for 8 hours = 6.64 amp hours - 15% to account for loss = 5.64 amp hours put into your battery

5.64 amp ours in during the day and 7.5 amp hours out at night = trashed battery in a few days.

Ok, so a long story short I think you are going to need that 60w panel and maybe a couple of good batteries in parallel so you can have ample power to charge when you have light and lots of amp hours to carry you on over cast days and long cold nights.

A little more complicated than you thought you where getting into eh? I am building a horizontal axis wind generator to help generate power at night, unfortunately you and I are both in some of the worst areas possible for wind power.

Quote:
Good idea. I happen to have a spare lawn mower battery and an older marine battery. I am already looking for a larger panel. Think I should go 60w?

I think 60w will get you more where you are going to need to be, but I also think that capacity is going to be the biggest hurdle. To get any kind of life out of your battery at all you are going to have to keep from discharging them any more than 20% at any time, if you discharge more than 20% you begin doing perminant damage to your battery. we can figure about how much power your little heat strip is going to draw in worst case scenario (running all night)

5 watts at 12 v = .41 amps

this says you get about 10 hours of daylight at this time of year
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=605

of those 10 hours you will probably only get 8 usable hours of solar power on a good day

that tells me you have about 16 hours of dark with no power per day, so

16 hours at .41 amps per hour = +/- 6.5 amp hours

you can count on an approximate 15% loss in power from the process of charging and discharging your battery so we will call it 7.5 amp hours

your battery would need to be at the minimum 37.5 amp hours which should be easy to get

now, the next question will those 8 hours of sun be enough to charge your battery enough to run all night.

with your current 20w panel you might be using 5watts on your heat strip, so we can only count on 15 watts, since you will RARELY actually get 20 watts I suspect you will really only be getting 15 watts out of your panel and using 5 watts so you might have 10w during daylight on a clear day.

so, 10w at 12v = .83 amps

.83 amps for 8 hours = 6.64 amp hours - 15% to account for loss = 5.64 amp hours put into your battery

5.64 amp ours in during the day and 7.5 amp hours out at night = trashed battery in a few days.

Ok, so a long story short I think you are going to need that 60w panel and maybe a couple of good batteries in parallel so you can have ample power to charge when you have light and lots of amp hours to carry you on over cast days and long cold nights.

A little more complicated than you thought you where getting into eh? I am building a horizontal axis wind generator to help generate power at night, unfortunately you and I are both in some of the worst areas possible for wind power.

Thank you for all the technical specs and equations. It helps me to get a picture of why your are skeptical about the current set up. Basically, I'll be drawing more energy from the battery that the panel will be able to charge it. So my battery will constantly be going below recommended discharge and this will ruin the battery in short time. Ill experiment with these spare batteries I have here until I get a larger solar panel. Know anyone looking for a slightly used 20 watt panel at a reasonable price?

Thanks for your help with all this. As you can tell, I don't know much about applied solar energy... just some basics I picked up while researching online. Yes, its a bit more complicated than I initially thought but I'm not deterred. You know my goal, and I plan to accomplish it. When all is said and done I'll probably have the only poultry waterer in the county that is heated via solar power. Its going to end up costing more than I expected. But once stable and complete, I wont ever have the redundant chore of replacing frozen drinking water everyday in winter. It's worth it to me, plus it will be nice to run a few muffin fans down there during the summer and LED lighting whenever I need it.

Another question: I had originally planned to attach the heat strip directly to the galvanized waterer on the side, near the bottom. Then run the wire up and through the chain that the waterer hangs from. However, every time I replace the water I will have disconnect the heat strip from the wire. Not a big deal, I guess... I can just get some simple connectors. But I got to thinking... would it make better sense to make a square frame of 2x4s (say 1ft square) and then attach a ceramic tile to the top of that. This would serve as a base to sit the waterer on. I could then attach my heat strip to the tile and it would be a heated base.

Which is a better conveyor of heat? galvanized metal or ceramic tile? The latter option would eliminate the need of ever needing to disconnect the heat strip.

Quote:
I think 60w will get you more where you are going to need to be, but I also think that capacity is going to be the biggest hurdle. To get any kind of life out of your battery at all you are going to have to keep from discharging them any more than 20% at any time, if you discharge more than 20% you begin doing perminant damage to your battery. we can figure about how much power your little heat strip is going to draw in worst case scenario (running all night)

5 watts at 12 v = .41 amps

this says you get about 10 hours of daylight at this time of year
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=605

of those 10 hours you will probably only get 8 usable hours of solar power on a good day

that tells me you have about 16 hours of dark with no power per day, so

16 hours at .41 amps per hour = +/- 6.5 amp hours

you can count on an approximate 15% loss in power from the process of charging and discharging your battery so we will call it 7.5 amp hours

your battery would need to be at the minimum 37.5 amp hours which should be easy to get

now, the next question will those 8 hours of sun be enough to charge your battery enough to run all night.

with your current 20w panel you might be using 5watts on your heat strip, so we can only count on 15 watts, since you will RARELY actually get 20 watts I suspect you will really only be getting 15 watts out of your panel and using 5 watts so you might have 10w during daylight on a clear day.

so, 10w at 12v = .83 amps

.83 amps for 8 hours = 6.64 amp hours - 15% to account for loss = 5.64 amp hours put into your battery

5.64 amp ours in during the day and 7.5 amp hours out at night = trashed battery in a few days.

Ok, so a long story short I think you are going to need that 60w panel and maybe a couple of good batteries in parallel so you can have ample power to charge when you have light and lots of amp hours to carry you on over cast days and long cold nights.

A little more complicated than you thought you where getting into eh? I am building a horizontal axis wind generator to help generate power at night, unfortunately you and I are both in some of the worst areas possible for wind power.

Thank you for all the technical specs and equations. It helps me to get a picture of why your are skeptical about the current set up. Basically, I'll be drawing more energy from the battery that the panel will be able to charge it. So my battery will constantly be going below recommended discharge and this will ruin the battery in short time. Ill experiment with these spare batteries I have here until I get a larger solar panel. Know anyone looking for a slightly used 20 watt panel at a reasonable price?

Thanks for your help with all this. As you can tell, I don't know much about applied solar energy... just some basics I picked up while researching online. Yes, its a bit more complicated than I initially thought but I'm not deterred. You know my goal, and I plan to accomplish it. When all is said and done I'll probably have the only poultry waterer in the county that is heated via solar power. Its going to end up costing more than I expected. But once stable and complete, I wont ever have the redundant chore of replacing frozen drinking water everyday in winter. It's worth it to me, plus it will be nice to run a few muffin fans down there during the summer and LED lighting whenever I need it.

Another question: I had originally planned to attach the heat strip directly to the galvanized waterer on the side, near the bottom. Then run the wire up and through the chain that the waterer hangs from. However, every time I replace the water I will have disconnect the heat strip from the wire. Not a big deal, I guess... I can just get some simple connectors. But I got to thinking... would it make better sense to make a square frame of 2x4s (say 1ft square) and then attach a ceramic tile to the top of that. This would serve as a base to sit the waterer on. I could then attach my heat strip to the tile and it would be a heated base.

Which is a better conveyor of heat? galvanized metal or ceramic tile? The latter option would eliminate the need of ever needing to disconnect the heat strip.

I would not sell your 20 watt panel, just add to it! you can put them in parallel with a couple diodes and add to the total input.

I am planning on doing something similar to your ceramic tile idea. my waterer is already on a 8" platform sitting on the ground, I was just going to put one of those little heat strips under one edge of the water. I thin kit would actually work better glues or taped directly to the galvanized waterer, but like you I would not want to have to unhook it all the time to refill it.