Las Vegas solar power
solar panel help is this enough?
I have a 60 watt solar panel array in las vegas. my need is to power a lighting transformer for 8 hours that draws 135 watts. I have a 400 watt inverter and my battery is a 55 amp hour gel cell deep cycle. if the sun shines all day as it does most days will this set-up work?
also is it better to not use the timer/transformer for the light and get a photocell and hook the lights direct to the battery ?
That panel is a good size for your battery, and you’re also in a good location – usually not too cloudy.
You should not drain that gel cell below 50% (else it will hurt the battery), so if it were fully charged, you would have (round number) 25 AH at 12 volts. That’s 400 watt-hours. That would power your 135-watt device for about 3 hours, maybe 2 hours once inverter efficiency is taken into account.
Your 60-watt panel could probably deliver an average of 400 watt-hours of energy per day. Las Vegas is a 7 equivalent sun-hour area, I think. 60 x 7 = about 400. You would get more in the summer, less in the winter, obviously.
But there’s another solution. Instead of going with 110-volt lighting, you could go with white LED lighting, and have your whole lighting system draw perhaps 40 watts, at 12 volts. Then you could dispense with the inverter, and that inefficiency. There are, in fact, solar powered security lights now available at Costco in my area. They replace spotlights, and use white LEDs.
