Going off grid!

This is a combination of 2 blogs from my myspace page.

Well, they finally arrived! 3 15 watt solar panels. I bought them from Harbor Freight you can see them here.

They are a little over a foot wide each and almost 36.5 inches tall. Took them outside this morning and leaned them up against a sawhorse and ran a few things off the DC car input like a CB radio and connected a little 12 volt motor to it. It was a cloudy day (and its winter) so I could only get about 15 watts out of all 3 panels. Everything ran fine and as far as I can tell the panels are in good working order. It was a very exciting time for the nerd inside me.

Soon (when I get paid) I will buy a deep cycle 12 volt battery from walmart and use the panels to charge that up and see how many lights I can run and for how long. Also I will buy a 400w power inverter from Lowe's ($45) so I can run some AC things like charging my cell phone, running a laptop, charging my 18v tool batteries. There also several camping DC powered things I want but most notable is the 12v stove top.

I can already tell it won't be long before I'm hooked on being self-sustaining and I'll have a crazy shack full of batteries!

This guy has the same set up I bought. Clicky

Below is also a video of a kit similar to mine:


Yesterday I bought a very large deep cycle marine battery from walmart and it came fully charged. So I bought a 400 watt power inverter and proceeded to hook up various things and you know that it wasn't long until I was playing mario kart with both the wii and television plugged into my battery. I did that for about an hour then I went out for a while and came back and fell asleep with the tv plugged into the battery and that was on for about 6 hours until I woke up. I was surprised the battery lasted that long on my big ass old tv.

Later dad came by and helped me install the solar panels on the roof. I made a brace for them out of scrap wood and it looks like shit, but will do the job. The battery was down to 11.5 volts and in the small amount of sun we had today has brought the battery back up to 12.1 which is almost topped off. Not to shabby for some harbor freight and walmart shit.

Tonight I'm going to plug my pc, monitor and speakers into my battery and see if I can't get a couple hours usage out of it for testing puproses.

*update* I did run my crt monitor and pc off the battery for about an hour, but because of the recent overcast I wanted to be sure I had enough battery life for emergency usage.