My new project is to design a Solar/Wind hybrid system to power a few MK boards,my max load will be 30~watts, Would I be correct to assume a load of 6watts per 433+radio card, 3 watts for 493,
Another item is solar panel efficiency, I have read complaints about the lack of efficiency of panels by just point them south and one had reported a 65% increase by using a solar tracker,
Tracker OK but tying to design one to withstand the elements of wind and especially overnight frost when the panels are stationary on high exposed site, I would welcome practical advice from anyone having used a hybrid system?
I found for a small system, solar trackers were too expensive. Yes, it is true that a solar tracker may increase performance by 60%, but not a really good deal when compared to adding another solar panel. The least expensive tracker was over $500. A second panel was $400 for a 100% increase.
Can anybody recommend a hybrid solar/wind charge controller for charging the battery bank,
I have not seen one that can be remote monitor the charging status of the both wind or solar?
for example a possible senario; if the solar panel was damaged and at the time the turbine was supplying enough to charge batteries, then I would not be aware until the turbine reduced charge and the battery level started to drop.
I suppose i could put two MK units 1 for solar, 1 for wind and monitor the voltage of each but that if i am correct a extra load at lowest is 6watts (3x2) ?
You should probably be doing a proper analysis of your proposed solar system. This analysis will include the average sunlight hours for your location, the total system load, the number of days the system should stay running off batteries without charging, the battery capacity to allow running for that many days, and the size of the solar panels required to charge that amount of battery capacity based on average sunlight.
There are many sites on the web that can describe this analysis in more detail.
Here in northern Alberta, Canada, I built a solar system to run a remote tower site that includes a 900MHz AP, a 5.8GHz backhaul, a site controller board, a switch, a DC-DC inverter, and heaters to keep the batteries and radio gear from getting too cold.
I used (4) 180W Panels and (4) 120Ah AGM Batteries. The panels are mounted vertically for two reasons. To help snow fall off, and for better alignment with the low sun angle during the winter when power is needed most.
In the summer, there is an abundance of power. In the winter it was calculated that there would be a 1% to 2% chance of the battery voltage getting too low. Despite the best predictions I have found that we can get extended periods of cloudy weather and 2 or 3 times during the winter I will have to hike up to the site and recharge the batteries with a generator. Of course, this never happens in favorable hiking weather!
we updated one of our solar stations with SFC fuell cell “EFOY Pro 600” 2 weeks ago because we had troubles during winter, and now we hope, and it looks great, that we dont need to climb the hill with one of our small honda generators agin…
we have 2x 120W solarpanel, and now we have only 24V 72 AH capacity because we needed the space for the fuel cell and the metanol tanks
before we had 24V 220AH and often had problems during winter - we only serve 1 RB430AH with 3 Wirelss cards and during daylight we have 2 mobotix cams running and a weatherstation - this maks a maximum power usage of 0,6A at 25V during dayligt and about 0.37A during night
at http://www.soaringclub-hohewand.at you can find the cams (see the solarpanels) and the weather http://www.sfc.com/
around 4000€ including the 2-tank switch - that automatically changes to the other tank when the first one is empty
and can be monitored also via serial console like this..
should be cheaper allready - there is a new consumer line from efoy avaliable
SFC>sfc
battery voltage 28.02V
output current 0.00A
operation time (charge mode) 1039.2h
operating state: auto off
operating mode: auto
cumulative output energy 20563.8Wh
no error
cartridge level above sensor or no sensor (cartridge 1 consumed 2.09l)
