--- In [email protected], Trevor Sheppard <listsandst...@...> wrote:
Sent a long post asking about solar power and giving his version of his electrical use - snipped for those using mobile connections. I am afraid that your description of electrical use can in no way be used as a basis of any recommendations. I suggest that you go onto my website and look at the battery & charging article in the technical article section. Work through that until you the point where you have calculated the amount of Ah you need to put back into the batteries for your level of use. This is the section entitled Charging batteries. t that point come back and tell us what your number of Ah is and then we will have something to work on. However I get the feeling that you are a livaboard or use the boat for long periods so I suspect that it would be prohibitively expensive, not to say impossible on a narrowboat's roof area, to fit sufficient solar to cover your needs in the winter. Wind in the right locations is probably a better bet for the winter. As an illustration last Tuesday, a very bright, sunny day my 60Watt panel was only producing 0.6 amps around midday and about 0.5 amps for the hour or so be for and after. I am happy with this because its a holiday boat and at the moment the panel is only trying to stop self discharge of the batteries. That figure would have been rather better if the panels were angled at 90 degrees to the sun and kept tracking the sun. You should be able to cover your needs, at a cost, during the summer months but we need accurate figures before we can go further. Tony Brooks
