This post will go into the Power and electricity sub-series of the off-the-grid main series of posts. These posts can be accessed from a table of contents and watched individually or in series from beginning to end.
With the BTU calculator, a fact popped out in clear sight. Let's take a look see:
The fact is that to use the freezer would take only 134 watts per hour. This translates into a little over 11 amps per hour at 12 volts. This is important in determining battery capacity needed. Let's say a 100 amp hour battery is being considered. The 100 amp hours is computed on the 20 hour rate, which means you need to keep the amp draw down to about 5 amps per hour in order to get the rated power out of it. Two of these batteries can handle the freezer for part of a day, it would seem. That's all that would be needed for climate control purposes.
With the swamp cooler keeping the temps down to 85 to 90 for most of the day, the ice can keep a small room in the comfort zone for the night, or about six hours. This has been demonstrated already.
A well shaded area could work even better.
A 100 watt solar panel will put out about 25 amps. That means eight of these. However, eight seems too many. Perhaps a wind turbine could be more useful?
The advantage of a wind turbine is that it could produce more power over time. With a 400 watt turbine, it may be possible to generate up to 9.6 kwh a day. This is quite optimistic, so expectations need to be a bit lower.
Four solar panels and a wind turbine may produce all the electricity I would need. Perhaps (3) 100 amp hour deep cycle batteries would suffice.
Perhaps it all could be done for 1500 bucks.
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