I have posted about my solar power experiment before and wanting to power a Wii and GameCube with it, not using an inverter or the original AC adapter. Also posted a few things about using a portable power station that can be charged with solar and that I used it to make coffee. 
To distract myself from the loss of my cats I started upgrading the solar panel and electrical wiring and put in a bigger battery bank! Went from two 7Ah Sealed Lead Acid to four 8Ah LiFePO4 batteries! Both set's were connected in parallel for a 12V nominal system. My latest upgrade was last month when I put all my liFePO4 batteries together into ONE BIG Battery... It took me nearly four days to rebuild it into this:
These are 11 x 12V 8Ah LiFePO4 batteries in parallel to make an 88Ah battery bank! I did had 12 originally but one of them did not want to charge up to the same voltage as the other ones. Every wire selected for the expected current and cut to the required length. Each battery has it's own 15A fuse and after combining them and the main disconnect switch there is one big 80A fuse to protect everything. That last picture is the Batterymonitor and the low state of charge was a planned test to see if the alarms were working and how low I could go. It took me nearly 16 hours to recharge with both a wall charger AND solar on a not so sunny day. If there were no clouds it could be recharged in full in about 4 hours from solar alone, and my wall charger is only 5A and I needed to recharge 80Ah, hahahah
You might be wondering what I can actually use this battery for. For the most part I now charge my phone's, tablet's and laptops exclusively from solar power! And I have been experimenting with bigger devices using a 220V inverter to power my big 49" 4K smart tv. To my surprise this does not use nearly as much power as I thought! Even with all kinds of losses in DC-DC converters and the DC-AC inverter with my TV on youtube, netflix or prime video it's only using 60-70 watts. Giving me about 15 hours if the battery is charged to 100% which is more than enough for me at night.
Without using the TV though I use about 20% of this battery...and usually it gets to 100% the next day from just solar power. If I do use the TV it's more like 60% of usage and I try only doing that if the weather forecast predicts lot's of sun hours to recharge. I did try using my PS4 on the inverter but my current setup does not like it that much...and it triggers an alarm and cuts the power off!........that's what you get for connecting things in different way's than they are supposed to. (it's bad practice so not even going to explain it...)
And here is a screenshot of the collected historical data:
This shows I have produced 37kWh over the last 90 days which means at current high energy prices in the Netherlands that saved me 25 euro's so far. It's not a lot yet...but it's a start! If I take the numbers from the last 30 days and expand that over a year thats nearly 120 euro's! I wish the numbers were higher but my battery and number of solar panels is just not big enough for that! yet! But saving money is not my biggest motivation for having solar panels....it's an obsessive interest in the electrical side and learning about that.
My very fist solar powered battery system could not even power a raspberry pi for more than 18 hours! And that was from 100% down to 0%! Which is very bad for SLA batteries....50% is recommended. So I would say I have improved it a lot already to be more useful and can even power my TV from it now or recharge my power tool batteries. And I have not been doing this for that long...only about 8 months I think.
I'll post more about the different parts of my solar system in the future. Thanks for now.
To distract myself from the loss of my cats I started upgrading the solar panel and electrical wiring and put in a bigger battery bank! Went from two 7Ah Sealed Lead Acid to four 8Ah LiFePO4 batteries! Both set's were connected in parallel for a 12V nominal system. My latest upgrade was last month when I put all my liFePO4 batteries together into ONE BIG Battery... It took me nearly four days to rebuild it into this:
These are 11 x 12V 8Ah LiFePO4 batteries in parallel to make an 88Ah battery bank! I did had 12 originally but one of them did not want to charge up to the same voltage as the other ones. Every wire selected for the expected current and cut to the required length. Each battery has it's own 15A fuse and after combining them and the main disconnect switch there is one big 80A fuse to protect everything. That last picture is the Batterymonitor and the low state of charge was a planned test to see if the alarms were working and how low I could go. It took me nearly 16 hours to recharge with both a wall charger AND solar on a not so sunny day. If there were no clouds it could be recharged in full in about 4 hours from solar alone, and my wall charger is only 5A and I needed to recharge 80Ah, hahahah
You might be wondering what I can actually use this battery for. For the most part I now charge my phone's, tablet's and laptops exclusively from solar power! And I have been experimenting with bigger devices using a 220V inverter to power my big 49" 4K smart tv. To my surprise this does not use nearly as much power as I thought! Even with all kinds of losses in DC-DC converters and the DC-AC inverter with my TV on youtube, netflix or prime video it's only using 60-70 watts. Giving me about 15 hours if the battery is charged to 100% which is more than enough for me at night.
Without using the TV though I use about 20% of this battery...and usually it gets to 100% the next day from just solar power. If I do use the TV it's more like 60% of usage and I try only doing that if the weather forecast predicts lot's of sun hours to recharge. I did try using my PS4 on the inverter but my current setup does not like it that much...and it triggers an alarm and cuts the power off!....
....that's what you get for connecting things in different way's than they are supposed to. (it's bad practice so not even going to explain it...)And here is a screenshot of the collected historical data:
This shows I have produced 37kWh over the last 90 days which means at current high energy prices in the Netherlands that saved me 25 euro's so far. It's not a lot yet...but it's a start! If I take the numbers from the last 30 days and expand that over a year thats nearly 120 euro's! I wish the numbers were higher but my battery and number of solar panels is just not big enough for that! yet! But saving money is not my biggest motivation for having solar panels....it's an obsessive interest in the electrical side and learning about that.
My very fist solar powered battery system could not even power a raspberry pi for more than 18 hours! And that was from 100% down to 0%! Which is very bad for SLA batteries....50% is recommended. So I would say I have improved it a lot already to be more useful and can even power my TV from it now or recharge my power tool batteries. And I have not been doing this for that long...only about 8 months I think.
I'll post more about the different parts of my solar system in the future. Thanks for now.
