Going solar

[perchie.girl]

Quote:
Think about that... It's a 5 watt panel. On a winter day with five hours of charging at best you have 25 watt-hours. That will run a 100 watt lamp for 15 minutes or a 250 watt heat lamp for a few minutes. That would be on a 12 volt lamp... Using an inverter increases the losses as they are nowhere near 100% efficient.

 

[perchie.girl]

Quote:
The twelve volt battery wont be enough to power a heat lamp. They are notorious for drawing alot of power. I dont know where you are but even people in the very cold climates rarely use heaters in their coops. Of course they only choose chickens who are naturally tolerant of cold temps. But certainly you could use solar for all your other needs for lighting and fans.

There are deep cycle batteries that are designed for storing power from Solar collectors. These suckers are not cheap. Nor are they small and easy to handle. I went into an at length study about using solar at my own home..... I decided the most important thing to run off solar would be the water pump. Even then when I do it I will have it set up to pump water in a trickle into a big water tank. then gravity will feed the house.

There are a couple of things you can do to help maintain the temperature within your coop and one of those is storing the Water supply tanks in there. Water will absorb quite a bit of heat and it will radiate for some time thereafter. Same thing goes for cooling. But thats a whole other subject. For passive heating within the coop you can build a solar wall.... but there are thousands of websites out there that discuss it. here is just one http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/SpaceHeating/Space_Heating.htm

 

[inohio]

Just a quick question. If your interest is in solar and providing heat, why are you going with a heat lamp? If you're not trying to assist chicks (but have adult chickens), why not make one wall an air based solar collector that stores into a heat sink of some sort? You could use old sliding glass doors (always posted for free on craigslist) and run the heated air through bricks (no freezing worry) as the heat sink. The bricks would heat during the day and give off heat through much of the night. In the summer, you could just cover the glass panes with something (even a 4x8 1/8th plywood) to prevent 'turn off" the heater.

As an alternative, if you have the ability to burry pipe deep enough, you could provide a constant 50 degree temp from geothermal heating. Obviously, when temps are above 50 degrees, the air won't rise, but if coop temp fall below 50 degrees, the 'hotter air' would rise up into the coop. This would take more engineering and insulation to make it worth the effort, but something like that would be totally maintenance free.