Solar powered grow room

I've searched this site but I can't find anyone that has their grow room running off of solar/wind power. I was just thinking an all grreen indoor grow would be the shit.

Sure, but it will take quite a bit of solar or wind power to run lighting. Then you have to think of the storage capacity to run your lights in time of low light levels.
Last time I did an evaluation of solar ran lighting it was going to take 1,200 watts of solar panels to run 400 watts of leds as a minimum.

There already are solar powered grow rooms. They're called 'Green Houses'.

I've always wanted to build a powerwall out of 18650's and cut my electrical bill. Panels are cheap now, it's your battery setup that gets pricey.

Its redundant and reductive. A waste of resources.

McCheeze said:

.... anyone that has their grow room running off of solar/wind power. I was just thinking an all grreen indoor grow would be the shit.

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It would be the shit, however, outside of large scale operation, it wouldn't be practical for the home hobby grower as the initial expense would take YEARS and years to get a ROI, and by then, the tech could have changed to make your gains moot anyways.

By all means, look into it, though, and if you find anything worthy, please come back and let us know.

If you do go solar use led cobs. They are DC power. With other types of lighting you will need to convert the DC from solar into account current and that causes loss.

I already have 2 Cree 3590s waiting on my power meter to get here so I know what I'm pulling out the wall. I've got a small setup 2ft x 2ft it should not be to terrible to go solar

McCheeze said:

I already have 2 Cree 3590s waiting on my power meter to get here so I know what I'm pulling out the wall. I've got a small setup 2ft x 2ft it should not be to terrible to go solar

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Yea. Easy. Harbor freight has 145 watt solar panels cheap. You can hook up to four of them together. Those with some deep cycle batteries work ld work great.


Honestly though for that small of a space it's not worth it. A large tv would cost more to run than a couple cobs.

This is a solar powered grow room

McCheeze said:

I've searched this site but I can't find anyone that has their grow room running off of solar/wind power. I was just thinking an all grreen indoor grow would be the shit.

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https://www.ubnt.com/sunmax/sunmax/
This is what have on my house I use all of their stuff networking wise other than microtik. They make a good product and a good GUI. It’s expensive I can’t remember what the finally price was I had it installed along with my geothermal. If you have the money and it’s designed correctly your roi will be there in a few years especially considering Michigan winters.

You need about 4 and a half time the surface area of your grow under solar panels... It is quite a l lot.

ANC said:

You need about 4 and a half time the surface area of your grow under solar panels... It is quite a l lot.

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and anther 2.5 x's that if you use batteries plus more if you have to convert some to AC. Just a guess

Just build a really nice greenhouse.

McCheeze said:

I've searched this site but I can't find anyone that has their grow room running off of solar/wind power. I was just thinking an all grreen indoor grow would be the shit.

Click to expand...

There's little advantage to using solar to power grow lights compared to powering a TV or anything else, other than during a power outage. And if one is worried about a power outage, a generator is a lot cheaper and more reliable than solar. Well, at least where I live.

The cheap and efficient way to power LED with solar is to do it directly, as a supplemental, rather than primary power source.
I've actually thought about this before and powered up some strips with my 150W, $200 solar panel. It was a direct connection, no batteries or electronics.

With careful matching, solar panels can connect directly to LEDs. That approach would give the highest possible electrical efficiency by eliminating the batteries, charge controller and a DC-DC inverter. Eliminating the batteries also eliminates the most expensive part of solar power!

I haven't tested it, but I think an AC powered, constant voltage power supply could be connected in parallel with the panel. As the the sun gets stronger, the panel pushes the voltage up a little past that of the CV supply and provides an increasing amount of the power.

A more conventional approach would be panels, batteries and a DC-DC inverter. A conventional LED driver could be used for the times when the panels are making little or no power. And that's a lot more of the time than most people realize!

I'll have to give it more thought, got some ideas rolling around.

i wouldn't try running a whole room with them, but they could be a crop saver when something happens to knock the power out for several days. especially for hydro guys, get an inverter and a bank of batteries and you could keep several plants alive till things got back to normal. we had a fire here a couple of years ago, and it took 11 days for the power to get turned back on. my plants in veg had all started to flower, my plants in flower survived, but got shitty yields. if i had a bank of batteries and an inverter,hooked to a couple of solar panels, they all could have gotten enough light to not be fucked up.

Average full sun hours almost everywhere is something like 4 and a half hours... So you are looking at like 1kW of panels for every 300ish Watt you need.