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Maier Hardware in Thunder Bay will be our equipment provider. This is the same company that supplied us with all our electrical needs when we built our home in Nolalu, 40 years ago. Maier is a long-time supplier of solar equipment in the region and has extensive knowledge and experience about what is needed for a remote installation like ours.
There may be cheaper suppliers; however, my experience is that I have never minded paying for quality and always regret buying junk.
We began by listing all of our electrical requirements to Maier's Dave Green. They were minimal. A cell-phone booster, the occasional use of a kitchen mixer, places for people to plug-in their computers and phones, CPAP machines for our friends and relatives. The biggest electrical consumer will be a washing machine but that won't be used every day and since we will dry our clothes on the clothesline, means we will be washing only on sunny days when solar power is plentiful.
At 3,000 watts our solar system is about as small as you can get without just buying some solar panels and charge controllers from Canadian Tire.
We already have a solar fridge and water pump. They are stand-alone units and won't be part of the bigger system. However, eventually the fridge will need replacing and when that time comes the new system is already designed to handle a standard Energy Star-rated home unit.
I can see it will take us awhile to get our heads around how to best use the solar system. Dave had asked if we were going to have a microwave or coffee maker. Of course not, we said, those things use too much electricity. Well, we still can have such conveniences, he pointed out. You just need to use them differently. For instance, rather than heating up leftover pizza in the propane stove oven -- something that might take 30 minutes and produce unwanted cabin heat in the summer -- we can pop it in the microwave for just a minute. A coffeemaker takes eight minutes to brew a pot. At that point we can pour the coffee into an insulated carafe and turn off the electricity-draining warming plate.
Thanks to LED technology, cabin lights are not even an issue. They take practically no juice.
We already have a water-treatment system that we have been using the last couple of years in the dockhouse. This uses filters and a UV light. We will move this to the big cabin. We filter just our drinking water which is kept in the five-gallon blue jugs. It takes about 10 minutes to fill two or three of these. For Brenda and me, that's enough for more than a week.
One of the things we have figured into the equation are electric fans for every person, especially for sleeping. These too don't use much power.
Our system is designed to produce the electricity we need most of the time but not in all circumstances. That would take a far more costly installation. In the fall when daylight is short or for extended cloudy periods, we will likely need to start the generator at times. This will both provide immediate power to the cabin but also will charge the solar system batteries in about four hours. The system will then be good for another few days without need of the generator. If sunny weather returns, we may not need the generator at all, even in the fall.
We can always use the generator for large power needs such as extended periods of using the air compressor and multiple power tools. Those things will run on the cabin system too, just not all day. The cabin system will easily recharge tool batteries and we have also purchased a cordless lawn mower.
The point is to drastically reduce our use of propane and gasoline -- fossil fuels -- and to preserve the peace and quiet of being in a wilderness area.
8 comments:
Dan, this solar system sounds perfect for you. Question, with the cell phone booster will you be able to post more updates to your blog in the summer. I do miss the updates and wildlife photos and look forward to reading your updated blog.
Mike S
That's the plan. First, we need to get the booster working. I get a smidgen of a signal on the ridge about 150 feet away from the cabin. My guess is that with a 50-foot tower which we are getting we will get be able to access that signal in the building. If there is any signal at all, the booster should bring it up to 5 bars.
Fingers crossed that we can get phone calls and post to the blog this summer.
Dan,
This is exciting! How many batteries and how many panels? In which direction do you have your panels facing? If due west is 9pm and due south is 6pm, which direction would you have these panels? Thank you!
I would say our two panels will be at 7 p.m. The panels are about 4x6 feet. We will have four large batteries. The panels will go on our shed roof and the batteries, charge controller and inverter inside the shed. The generator sits on the shed porch. We noticed that the sweep of the sun in the summer shines right along our narrow clearing. This lets us have trees along the lakeshore to provide shade for the front of the cabin and to anchor the soil. Our stand-alone fridge panel will be on the wall of the cabin itself, basically above where the fridge will be sitting. This side faces SE. The fridge and its four golf cart batteries need six hours of direct light to fully charge. We should have that until near the end of August. The main cabin needs four hours. We can supplement the fridge system charging with the main cabin's AC system, when needed.
We're thinking about moving our panels to our cabin from workshop. Our cabin roofline faces 7-730p with zero obstruction. The workshop location roofline faces 6p and theres far too many trees still in the way for full efficiency. May, June and July aren't the problem for us, although when we don't feel we're getting enough charge after 4pm. Theres still tons of energy from the sun between 4p and 8p in the summer months if your panels are facing more west than south. We find we don't use a lot of electricity in the AM or afternoon and majority of our electricity is used after 6p. We're still learning. Great post by the way!!
Thanks for that info. Straight south makes sense for winter but like you say, the sun is still up quite late in at least early fall so it helps to have a look somewhat to the west.
If our installation works as planned, our panels won't be visible from the lake. I see quite a few others where they are right on the shoreline. I get that is where there's the most sunlight but I feel it is also an eyesore. Hopefully our plan will work.
Agree on the eye sore. No reason you can't have the panels on a building or at least off shore. Has your ice off date changed? I thought I read on an earlier post you were thinking May 8 or May 10.
Yeah, I have adjusted my prediction again due to the past two weeks of winter weather. I now think May 13 is more likely.
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