How To Make A Solar Generator For Your Grow OP

southfloridasean

Well-Known Member
You guys are missing one fact,
It's not free energy for life after you buy the system. Things break!
solar dies, batteries die... cables fail
The cost to maintain the system is on going...

Careful what your planning... there are hidden costs
I would not be any different than the occasional interruption of electricity that Im sure all of us have experienced or a natural disaster such as a hurricane or flood. In the long run the electricity companies simply ad on those damages to the end users bill. When you have solar you are now the electric company & like loud blunts said you can get a kick back from the electric company for what you haven't used. :hump:
 

Shook

Well-Known Member
The best way to use solar power to grow plants is to grow them outside under the sun.
A 1000w light would require about 3000w of panels and over 3000 amp hours worth of battery to run for just 12hrs per day every day for 2 months without fail.
it was about $6+/watt for solar panels last time i looked. and about $1/AH for batts
could buy a lot of weed for the cost of that type of setup.

Wind power on the other hand would be a bit cheaper, if you can build a wind generator yourself, but you need a good supply of wind. The battery requirements would still be the same though.
this is NOT true at all, you can get em at $1 or less per watt. and flexible and cuttable to any size.

http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/12/04/nanosolar-thin-flexible-solar-cell-coating/
Nanosolar - Products
 

Picasso345

Well-Known Member
why not just take the panels with you?????
Are all the panels and batteries and wiring and inverters, etc really portable after spending years and years mounted in your house? I suppose they are in some manner, hell they can move a whole house. The thought of moving all that just seems ponderous. I hate moving. :joint:
 

Smitty750

Well-Known Member
check out this site. The guys are pretty cool and most states give very large money incentives to help pay for the purchase and installation. There are also large federal rebates available to pu towards the purchase and install. You could get almost 70-80% of the system paid for by local and federal gov't. How funny is that the gov't is paying to have something installed to help you grow weed. HAHHAHAHAHAAHHHAHAHAHHAHAAH

Akeena Solar. The Nation's Leading Solar Power Installer
 

southfloridasean

Well-Known Member
Are all the panels and batteries and wiring and inverters, etc really portable after spending years and years mounted in your house? I suppose they are in some manner, hell they can move a whole house. The thought of moving all that just seems ponderous. I hate moving. :joint:

When your making money moving wont be an issue. Everythings fun when your making $:mrgreen:, its only when were not things start looking bad :cry:.
:peace:
 

FilthyFletch

Mr I Can Do That For Half
Special that is fine if you could have a simple monthly paymnet plant but I dont have the $65 grand to drop all at once time. Then like said battereis have a 3-5 year life so figure $100 a battery minimum and to hold enough power thats about 25 batteries as told to me byt the 3 quotes I got so every 3 years add about $2500 to the total and also assume your panels dont get broken from hail,hard freeze, heavy snow, or wind damgae which I get all yearly.Loud those prices I gave were from about 8 months ago.My state allows up to $5000 sunsidies for adding a full solr grid addition.Thats a 1 time cost but you have to meet certain criteria they wont give you $5 grand to just ad a partial panel system.Ill look around and see if I still have the quote papers and post everything needed to be off grid full solr 24 hours a day. I looked at that cabin setup and for 5 grand he is able to run a few cfls bulbs a laptop a few days a week and his tv a couple times a week. So he is able to run about 250 watts 3 days a week which does what he needs but not what your thinking of doing with it. And thats with the assitence of the windturbine addition as he said before it was no tv and laptop
 

DragonsBreath

Well-Known Member
I think everyone should look into solar for there house, It's a needed change.

If I could run my AC every night during the summer for just 200-300 by putting a solar panal on top of my AC facing the rising the sun would be amazing. AC runs me 100 a month by it self.
 

gst1147

Active Member
Big Watts, Low Cost


A method developed by US researchers for making solar panels is closing in on mass production and could bring us the 50 pence per Watt device
Solar energy conversion is potentially one of the most powerful methods to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. However, the photovoltaic materials used to convert sunlight into electricity are expensive and inefficient, which makes the wide scale adoption of solar energy unviable with present technology. Now, Walajabad Sampath of Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, and colleagues have developed a new way to make photovoltaic materials that overcomes the problem of cost and inefficiency by allowing solar energy to be produced at a fraction of the cost of conventional solar panels and so could cut the price of solar power generation to below the $1 per Watt threshold.
Sampath and colleagues have developed a continuous, automated manufacturing process for solar panels by developing a method for creating a thin film of the PV material cadmium telluride on glass instead of using standard high-cost crystalline silicon. The resulting devices are more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, 11-13% efficient, which could make these panels competitive with generic power from the electrical grid in many parts of the world.
"This technology offers a significant improvement in capital and labour productivity and overall manufacturing efficiency," explains Sampath, who is director of Colorado State's Materials Engineering Laboratory, "The current market is over $5 billion annually and additional markets are developing." To commercialize the invention, Sampath and colleagues Kurt Barth and Al Enzenroth formed AVA Solar and have subsequently raised two rounds of funding and been awarded a $3 million ($1.5m) grant from the US Department of Energy's Solar America Initiative.
 

southfloridasean

Well-Known Member
I think everyone should look into solar for there house, It's a needed change.

If I could run my AC every night during the summer for just 200-300 by putting a solar panal on top of my AC facing the rising the sun would be amazing. AC runs me 100 a month by it self.
What are you in like a 3-4 bedroom house?
 

notavailable

New Member
After Dec 31 2008, the Feds will reimburse 30% of the Cost (with no cap, previous $2k cap removed)

States also have reimbursement plans. Im in California and the Department of Water and Power gives out a 1 time payment for reimbursement.

Price of system depends on whether its an On-Grid or off Grid system. (If your using batteries, or are net-metereing with a utility.)

Net-metering is when you basically roll your meter back when producing excess energy, and only pay for whatever your net usage is. This is what most residential systems are.

For a 4-5KW system it runs around $30k before all the tax incentives and rebates which cuts the cost in half.

IMPORTANT: Some utilities require you to install an upgraded meter that records time of day usage. Worse, some require you to install an additional meter, 1 for your solar production, and 1 for your use.

Most will allow you to continue with a "simple meter" that works just like the mile counter on your car. Your produce extra energy, it rolls back, you use energy, it rolls forward. you pay the difference.

I say this is important because I dont want an extra meter so they can say WOW! This guy is producing mad juice but he's using it all and then some! WTF is going on over there?

With a simple meter there is much less info to analyze. Not huge, but helps you sleep a little better.
 

omar701

Active Member
right now solar energy is like 3-4 times more expensive than the energy from the grid. there `s far more reaserch to do. The only way you are going to lower the cost of your system is by making it DG system, you will not have to deal with batteries(batteries are very expensive and not much efficient they have to be replace by new ones in a few years from new). in the day when the sun is pumping you will try to supply all the power that you consume, if you exeded the power that you consume you can sell it to the company that you buy energy from. and in night when there is no sun to power you system/house you close a switch and now you buy energy from them. it is going to lower your monthly bill a lot, you will have to power your lights in the day when the sun is up in the sky and you are in peak production of energy.
 

atombomb

Well-Known Member
Just build a Nuclear reactor. Use its heat to generate steam to run a turbine generator.

This guy did.
Hahn, nicknamed the "Radioactive Boy Scout", is an Eagle Scout who got a merit badge in Atomic Energy and spent years tinkering with basement chemistry which sometimes resulted in small explosions and other mishaps. He was inspired in part by reading The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, and tried to collect samples of every element in the periodic table, including the radioactive ones. Hahn diligently amassed this radioactive material by collecting small amounts from household products, such as americium from smoke detectors, thorium from camping lantern mantles, radium from clocks and tritium (as neutron moderator) from gunsights. His "reactor" was a large, cored-out block of lead, and he used lithium from $1,000 worth of stolen batteries to purify the thorium ash using a Bunsen burner.[1]
Hahn posed as an adult scientist or professor to gain the trust of many professionals in letters, despite the presence of misspellings and obvious errors in his letters to them. Hahn ultimately hoped to create a breeder reactor, using low-level isotopes to transform samples of thorium and uranium into fissionable isotopes.
Although his homemade reactor never achieved critical mass, it ended up emitting dangerous levels of radioactivity, likely well over 1,000 times normal background radiation. Alarmed, Hahn began to dismantle his experiments, but a chance encounter with police led to the discovery of his activities, which triggered a Federal Radiological Emergency Response involving the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The United States Environmental Protection Agency, having designated Hahn's mother's property as a Superfund hazardous materials cleanup site, dismantled the shed and its contents and buried them as low-level radioactive waste in Utah. Hahn refused medical evaluation for radiation exposure.

He was arrested in Michigan in 2007 for stealing smoke detectors from his apartment bldg. Wonder if he got it right this time? Or died????
 

ANC

Well-Known Member
If you realy went big schale you could turn the biomass from the stalks and leaves into fuel...

I noticed there are also some realy neato micro wind turbines that will work with even 2kmph winds... of course you need a bunch of them but they are supposed to be cheap.
 
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