Off-grid power system

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This goes in the off-the-grid power subseries.

Turning my attention towards how to power da trailer.

Quite an education, this is.

So far, I've gotten the rudiments of a system thought out.  It would consist of

• 4 of these 160 watt solar panels
• 8 of these 42 amp hour   deep cycle batteries
• 60 amp charge controller
• Pure Sine Wave Power Inverter 1800W, 12VDC 

There's plenty of other hardware needed, but these basics are costly.  About a grand for the panels, over a grand for the batteries, and the inverter is another grand.  Other stuff could add up to yet another grand.  Four thousand bucks, easy.

Get this, for all that money, I will be able to get maybe 2 kilowatt hours of power per day out of it.  That figures at less than 25 cents worth of electricity at the plug when you are on da grid.

Somebody would love to steal this stuff, so you'd have to guard it with your very life.

Update:

May want to add one of these babies.  Honda's EU2000i portable generator.  I have a generator, but it is gasoline powered.  This one is too, but it can be converted to propane if you buy the kit and follow instructions on this video.

To save money, I could scale down to from 2 kwh to just 1 kwh daily.  That would save the money to buy the generator.  Still could be in excess of 3k dollars plus the extra hardware needed to put it all together.

Update:

Some discussion is in order.  The reason the inverter is so costly is that it must accommodate the freezer.  The freezer pulls 1800 watts and this thing will handle that and the surge when it starts up, most likely.

I could scale down from 2 kwh to 1 kwh, but that same freezer may take up close to half of that, if it's just one.  On the other hand, the freezer could be shut off for a few days at a time, and there shouldn't be a problem, although you cannot guarantee that if the food is frozen.

By the way, the freezer may be useful for storing deer meat if I manage to bag one of those.

The trailer could take up as much as 7 kwh by itself if I went all electric.  That's the reason for the solar water heater for warming.  If you could pick up some heat off the generator, this may be useful for heating purposes.  May need a boiler for hot water when the sun doesn't shine.  I was thinking of using an exhaust pipe extension for the generator so as to move the exhaust out of the living area.  Now, if that extension was rigged with a heat exchanger, you can get some hot water out of it to boot.  Warming up during the winter is more of a problem than cooling, I think.  When it's hot, you get power from the sun, and if needed, you can add a swamp cooler and a little extra thingie I thought up with the freezer.  The canopy will keep the hot sun off and prevent heat buildup.

I've got a space heater here that uses 500 watts electric.  If you run that all of the time, it would drain the batteries in a couple of hours.  Can't have that.  The generator (s) could heat warm water to assist in heating, plus the use of the solar heater may add some more, but not all of the time.  If all else fails, you could use an electric blanket and dress very warmly.

Bottom line is that it could cost upwards of 4 grand and it will still be inadequate at times.