[Elecraft] Anyone use Solar Power for your ham shack?

[Tom Azlin W7SUA]

Hi Mike,

I am working on taking my station completely off the grid. Have three 12 
volt 100 watt panels and looking for radio compatible charge 
controllers. I have a 1200 amp-hr station battery I made from 6 1200 
amp-hr cells that I plan to charge with just these panels. The station 
battery also runs a 45 quart Whynter AC/DC fridge just incase our AC 
grid goes away since we are out in rural Yavapai County with just a 
single phase power line coming in to the area. I like the ideas in the 
other emails on quiet charge controllers.

I would add that our house here in central Arizona has forty 250 watt 
panels on the roof with two Sunny Boy SMA-5000TL-US inverters each with 
the 1500 watt off-grid feature. I specified to EV Solar here in AZ ( out 
of business now unfortunately) that the installation should be RF quiet. 
The EV Solar owner said that then I needed these particular inverters as 
they were the quietest he had installed. With my K3 and my 160m OCF inv 
V and 40/30/20 yagi 200 ft away up the hill behind our house I can not 
tell the different between the inverters up and running and when I open 
the solar inverter DC and AC breakers. Or for that matter when I switch 
one of the inverters to off-grid and feed that 1500 watts to my station 
( when garage/shack built the electricians wired that circuit in to the 
shack with the other inverter off-grid circuit going to the kitchen). I 
charge my station battery with a 9AM to 3PM timer now so that I have a 
good backup. Just run my station on house AC other that when we have a 
power outage. Our 40 panels produce more w-hrs over a year than we use 
but we use the local power company as a "battery" and only get paid 
whole sale price for the excess power we generate so have to pay for 
electricity 3 months out of the year. Of course connect charges of about 
$15 each month even if we do not pull power. Long term goal is restoring 
this house to its original off grid condition. I have another south 
facing 15 ft x 30 ft roof area without panels but also will need to add 
batteries for the house and upgrade the inverters.

One other ham friend who did not pick these SunnyBoy inverters, rather 
has panels with individual grid tied inverters had to turn them off for 
noise free operation. Another friend with one of these SunnyBoy 
inverters has zero HF noise.

73, tom w7sua

On 2/13/2019 10:56 AM, mjpilgrim wrote:
> I've employed a small solar power system to supply my ham shack which
> includes K3-100/P3, two PCs with flat screen monitors, and 20" flat screen
> TV.  This began as a basic test bed to understand Solar Power, so i know i
> have lots to learn, and perhaps I have answers to help others with the same
> interests.
> 
> I'd like to hear  of your trials, errors, and decided solutions for best
> results.  I'm now researching best price performers for a pure sine wave
> inverter so i can merge my ATT u-Verse gateway/wi-fi and associated devices.
> Also, when running CW on the K3 i occasionally encounter LOW BATTERY error,
> requiring a few seconds of UP-Key to allow the batteries to recover.  I'd
> like to discuss that symptom relative to my sizing considerations in the
> Solar Power system.  On paper it appears sufficient.  Sometimes i
> wonder............
> Drop me a note via email so we might continue this conversation at length.
> Thanks.  Mike, K5MP
> 
> 
> 
> --
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