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Solar Panel for Obsy?


Earl

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I think the responsed on power ius a little pessimistic. A 80W panel is just that - capable of delivering 80W in full sunlight.

The factors for me are - the height of the sun, the degree of cloud cover and the losses between 16/17v and 13v delivered to the battery.

So I reckon instead of 80W you are getting 10W, a little under 1Amp-hour at 12 V.If youuse less than 6AH per day you are fine. If not, you need to understand your observing rate and battery load to work out if the time between sessions allows yoiur battery to charge to full at this rate. As long as you don;t discharge below 50% or so in times of multiple observing sessions, youl'll be fine.

Also if you are running at over 15W charge load, you should really use a charge controller.

regards

Mike

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FWIW, my 3640 watt (peak) array has generated an average of just over 10.5 kWh per day for the last month (measured at the meter). On those figures you'd expect an 80W panel to generate about 0.25kWh per day in the same situation. I reckon that would give a fair chunk of your power consumption.

Different panels have different efficiencies and perform differently as light levels vary too so it is somewhat more complicated, but at least these are real figures generated in a live UK-based installation.

James

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Humm

Thanks for all the info, Im going to look into this again when we buy our next house we both want to go the solar route but as a standalone unit for the obsy its probably not going to be practical.

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  • 2 weeks later...

A note on my earlier post... I do only connect my 110ah battery to 2x heater strips and my Canon 1000D (I use mains for the scope). So the solar panel manages to replenish that with ease. Im sure if I hooked up the Synscan as well, the solar panel would not replenish it. What Psychobilly said is important.

Cheers

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