The whole silly micro-debate over wattage evolved from this simple mis- statement by Sunny...
> Is that 2 watts an hour? sounds great! Trem had answered: > 2 WATTS Sunny previously asked: >> Does anyone know how many watts a silver gen or similar might use. >> We are moving off grid ... getting a solar panel of 100 watts All that was needed was to address her actual question: Sunny, There's no time involved with wattage. Something that draws 2 watts from your solar panel will do so all the while it's connected. So if you're adding up possible peak loads for your 100 watt collector, just add the wattage figures for everything you might want to run AT THE SAME TIME to get a *ROUGH* idea of if it will handle it. Now, there is something called a watt-hour, which is probably where your confusion came from. Watt-hours are the wattage rating of a device times the number of hours you run it. A 100 watt load running for an hour will consume a total of 100 watt-hours of energy. A 500 watt load will use the same amount of total energy in only 1/5th of an hour, or 12 minutes... but it'd also try to pull more power all at once than your 100 W collector can provide... so that doesn't work too well. There is an easy way to fix the problem: While you're studying all this, you should consider getting a separate battery and some kind of charger-controller so you can store up some of the power from the solar panel to use at night without running the risk of depleting your RV cranking battery. It also lets you handle higher peak loads -- like the aforementioned 500 watt blow-dryer? <grin> -- without having to get a much bigger solar panel, *and* let you run them when there's no sun. If you're able to pull 100 watts from your panel over an average of 8 hours a day, you've got an "energy budget" of 8 hours x 100 watts or 800 watt hours. If you want to run a 500 watt load for an hour each day, you'll see that you're going to use up 500 of your 800 available watt-hours. Do-able, but maybe not sustainable? Then again, maybe important enough, especially if the remaining 300 watt-hours will take care of everything else you need. It's not hard to learn how to figure this stuff out. Once you get the hang of figuring out your energy budget and the difference between watt- hours and watts, you'll be able to estimate these things in your head. Trem's 2 watts is NOT a big worry for you, obviously! You'll want most of your equipment to be 12 volt, but you're going to need 110-volt AC for some things, at least occasionally. You'll need a power inverter for this, and the size of load it can handle will be limited by the battery, not by the collector. There are lots of clever ways to hook things up, all of which will be talked about in the RV community as well as among boaters. You'll still want to be frugal, but you've got a lot more flexibility this way. The lifestyle can be pretty pleasant. Good luck Mike D. [Mike Devour, Citizen, Patriot, Libertarian] [mdev...@eskimo.com ] [Speaking only for myself... ] -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: silver-list@eskimo.com Address Off-Topic messages to: silver-off-topic-l...@eskimo.com The Silver List and Off Topic List archives are currently down... List maintainer: Mike Devour <mdev...@eskimo.com>
