Solar power!

Idk where to start so let me just say what I wanna do.

I would like to run at least all my ventilation off solar.. thing is I'm running my lights at night but ventilation will be active 24/7

Ventilation would be about 6/7 fans, 6 & 8 inline fans and duct fand, unsure on how many watts

What should I be looking into?

Spending a lot of money...

You are looking at solar cell panels, a bank of deep cycle batteries, inversion equipment....

By the time you are done, you might as well switch to LED lights, and run the whole system off batteries, and let them charge in the day time....

Would be a super long time before the savings managed to pay off the cost for moving ventilation to solar....

It really be expensive to run a couple 100watts of power off solar? I don't believe it in this age of technology....

How many watts are the fans combined? and what is the cfm?

@xxxViperxxx

5 - 16inch oscillating fans
1 - 8 inch 745 cfm
1 - 8 inch 420 cfm
1 - 6 inch 440 cfm
1 - 6 inch 240 cfm

I have no idea what the wattage would be

Garden_viking said:

It really be expensive to run a couple 100watts of power off solar? I don't believe it in this age of technology....

Click to expand...

You might want to know the total watts on the fans before you say something like that. The problem with solar these days is batteries, not panels.

Since you have electricity at your site, you should look into net metering- selling your homemade power back to the power company.
This will stop you from having to buy an inverter and battery bank. Maintaining a battery bank is an important chore that needs to be done correctly or you will be buying another prematurely.

If your looking into solar to keep the man from knowing how much power your consuming, I'd invest in a small diesel generator and a battery bank. You can run the Genny and charge your batteries as often as needed.
None of these options are cheap. Just buying your power is the most economical choice.

Yes you would need to calculate your amp hours and figure system design from that. you would need solar collectors at about 1$/watt, racking, dc/ac inverter, DC charge controller and battery bank with sufficient storage space. realistically gonna cost u around 800-900. look into northern tool they sell kits also harbor freight has them

But to do it manually you need to know watts per hour by hours run. let's say 6 fans at 250watts an hour 24 hours a day. 1500 watts from all 6 fans 24 hours a day. 36,000 w/hour a day. next divide watt hour by battery voltage so a 12v battery would need 3000 amp hour. take into account inverter efficiency of 85% so you would need 3450 amp hour battery bank. I

Don't mean to interrupt,but maybe you could answer this ? I saw this solar set up on amazon that all you do is set up the panel and plug it into a receptacle and it supposedly puts power back into your home saving you $.My ? is could a system be set up lets say 6KW in the same way so basically the output would plug into your main after the meter.The reason I ask is I have a couple of invertors that are designed to be used on the grid and would like to do something like that if possible

Hippee, the closest you can get to simple plugging in is limited by nec national electric code. a 200 amp panel can have 40amp max back feed. so one big inverter on a 40 amp breaker or smaller ones on 2 20 amp breakers. a plug into a receptacle solar kit would in my opinion be severely undersized. I have 26kw in my backyard, all is fed through 200 amp feeders line side connected to the wires coming out of the meter panel. so there are really two legit ways to connect solar, 1) via backfed circuit breaker, 2) a line side tap which is basically just splicing into the main wires that go from the meter to your main control panel

thanks for the reply so lets say I made that happen a 40 amp backfeed into a breaker would that slow my meter down any,I just can't wrap my brain around how it would, doesn't yours have a special meter that will turn backward or is it everything I run off that breaker is free and when the sun goes down so does my power

Yes my meter works in both directions so in the summer I over produce and it goes backwards until I'm consuming more energy then producing. net energy meter. to get one you would need to go about it the right way with permits and interconnection agreement with electrical utility company. I installed solar for a few years, some of the old analog meters only count up regardless of flow direction, meaning any excess you were producing you were doing so for the regular rate of electricity and not using any of it

Like Brazil, home based solar power is almost ready for prime time- and it always will be.

I'm looking into fuel cells.

Fuel cells are not something that's happening in the us, to many idiots without a clue.

You might get more bang for your buck by reducing the wattage. Switching some of your space over to high power cob leds will increase the efficiency of your lighting allowing you to dial back the watts and cooling without losing weight.

If your temps can handle it, installing variacs on the fans could allow you to dial back how much power they use.