5:42 and the fan is running

After a couple of days of pretty good sun and having all my solar panels in use I figure that 11 hours of daylight a day even if it’s only producing 10% of my 95W of potential power should have produced a minimum (two days) of 209 watt hours or 17 AH of electricity. That should be enough to run my 4A of fans and light for about 4.25 hours. I rather suspect that it will be considerably less - more like 30 minutes. To avoid corrupting the figures, the solar panels were turned off at the commencement of the experiment.

For ventilation I do get the feeling that a proper roof hatch and floor vents is probably a better way of doing things. Use natures convection to remove hot air. Indeed, the Arabs have had air conditioning for centuries. They have underground reservoirs stocked with fish that eat mosquito larvae. Air is sucked in via convection and then passes up into homes. The homes have tall chimneys that increase draft so the hot air is expelled and cool, moist air is drawn in. Very neat and very low maintainance.

Anyway the upshot of the test was that at 6:02 the light started flashing though I’d heard the fan slow down way before that. The voltage on the watt meter kept dropping and when it got to 10.4v with thelight flasing and the fan doing hardly anything, I stopped the experiment. At that point the 4A recorded power usage should have been about a third of 4Ah. Indeed it came out at 2Ah though I did not zero the meter before commencing the experiment.

Today the weather is cloudy but there’s still plenty light - sufficient for solar power! What I really need to do to get definitive figures is to install two meters. One on the solar input and one on the battery usage. Right now I’m kind of kicking myself for allowing myself to be tempted into using solar panels.

I have two 10W panels and I think they might have been $25 each. I have a 15W panel that was probably $50 and I have two 30W panels that were about $60 for the pair. Thats $160 of solar panels plus the dubious Harbor Freight $75 battery that I actually paid $50 for after coupons.

Now, with a split charger and a big marine battery put in the battery compartment with the bus batteries I would have no issue with solar panels and indeed a big 100AH marine battery would have been $100. That could have been charged using an ordinary car battery charger when the bus engine wasn’t running and that could have been run off a $80 Harbor Freight lightweight portable generator.

At 100AH I would have 50AH of power giving me 12 hours of one light and the extraction fans instead of a 35AH battery giving me 17AH or 4.25 hours of light and fans. The kicker there is that I would have spent $30 less doing it that way.

So, what’s the way forward? I’m still not sure what’s going on - whether it’s the solar thing that’s garbage or the battery. I did see somebody trying and failing to run solar powered air conditioning on their top of the line RV on youtube. I believe their AC kicked in at 80A and ran at 50A. They were congratulating themselves over having working AC but 50A at 12V is still 600 watts and my experience of solar is that it doesn’t provide anywhere near the wattage promised.

The crazy thing is, a few minutes after the voltage dropped to 10.5v, it was back up to 13v which is were it currently stands. It’s now 6:25 and the voltage is 13V. Now on a rational system that would be a 100% battery.

Assuming for some unknown reason I’ve been well and truly shafted by Harbor Freight and that inside my huge 35Ah U1 sized battery is a tiny little 4.5AH burglar alarm battery, in 25 minutes at say 10W then I might have picked up half an amp hour of power. Being generous and saying I’m picking up 50% of what my panels are rated at then that would be 45-50ah so say 45ah. Over 25 minutes (say half an hour) that would be 1.875AH. Indeed, that would probably be about half the battery and a reason for the battery to be full.

I can honestly say whatever’s wrong, I’m not very impressed! The next stage will be to roll underneath the bus to see about removing the offending battery. Then I’ll put it on a proper battery charger before retesting. There are two possible scenarios then. If the battery runs the fans for a full 4 hours then then the solar side is a total waste of time and I might just as well strip the panels off, patch the rivet holes and toss the panels before going for the split charger and bigger battery that I feel I was talked out of in the first place. Or I could just leave the panels there and recognize all they’ll do is reduce power usage. If its the battery then I have a lawnmower battery standing by ready to take its place.

Right now I’m so irked I could spit! I do feel the world has been hoodwinked by the green movement. Because the energy generators could not make their power more efficiently (read were unwilling to make the investment) the blame for greenhouse gasses (don’t get me started on that one) was placed on the hapless consumer. The hapless consumer was told to use energy efficient (read dimmer) light bulbs. Instead of using standard incandescent light bulbs that lasted as long as the manufacturers designed them (6 months) and which were made of glass, steel, plaster and tungsten, all of which could be happily buried in your vegetable patch with no worries, the hapless consumer was pushed to compact fluorescent lighting. CFL is far dimmer so the lies that said a 9W CFL was equivalent to a 100W incandescent meant people had to get 18W CFL. Now the CFL is made largely of glass and plastic and mercury. Mercury is highly toxic and the vapor form of mercury in the CFL will kill and cause all kinds of nasty effects.

Eventually CFLs got better in longevity but not in toxicity and not in recyclability. The glass from an incandescent bulb would have broken down into sand over time while the rest would have rusted away and been absorbed by the soil in a harmless way. CFLs remain toxic for centuries. Then some smartass came out with LED lights. Harsh, directional light that’s nowhere near as bright as claimed. While the LED lights have no real toxins aside from phosphorous, they cannot be recycled and have no place to go other than landfill. They will not break down like an incandescent bulb. They don’t last as long as manufacturers claim either. In the bathroom I put 4 LED bulbs. There was an incandescent there already. The incandescent (which hasn’t been made for 5 years) is still working. The LEDs - only one is still working. They were supposed to last 10 years and three didn’t last more than 6 months. One didn’t make a week! In my bus one LED failed within a very short period.

So, green movement? Not really - pollution movement. Look at the cadmium, arsenic and mercury plus all the slave labour that goes into making solar panels. They’re not exactly green. Look at all the unrecycable waste the green movement has produced. CFLs, LEDs... None of it is recyclable.

The problem with the green movement is in measurement. They don’t give honest measures of anything. Coal fired power stations produced soot and carbon dioxide. The soot could be cleaned with filters. The carbon dioxide captured and turned into something else. But no - carbon dioxide is bad because the power stations can’t be bothered to recycle it or clean up their act. Hence it became the fault of the consumer. That logic feels like a rapist being appointed to be the judge in their own rape case.

Give me a generator and let me run it off alcohol. That’s green. The generator is steel and steel is recycled. Alcohol comes from plants. No slave labour is involved nor especially polluting processes needed to make the generator nor the alcohol.

Looking under the bus nd getting awfully sandy in the process, I saw my offending battery. It’s going to be a challenge to remove. I think it was a challenge to install too. Unlike most other things, the battery connectors seem to use a 10mm bolt. Well, I have a 10mm wrench but I need two. I certainly don’t want to go to Harbor Freight and don’t remember how I did it last time either.

So, I looked at the battery again and decided what I need to do once the battery is loose and on the ground is to put it in the right way around. At the moment the black cable goes to positive and the red to negative. I was too fed up to switch it around. Another thing I need to do is to add some kind of easy connector that I can just pop apart and pull the battery down.

I grabbed a battery charger from the shed with the intention of trying it on the battery but what with it getting dark, I really didn’t feel too much like it today. Tomorrow though is a complete other day! This will be my last ditch attempt with this battery. If when I turn the solar and the battery off and charge it for 8 hours, it doesn’t give me the power I need, it’s the battery that’s dead.

Meanwhile I shall look online to see if I can get a second watt meter. That will allow me to measure incoming solar and outgoing power simultaneously. That’ll tell me where I am. Another thought is to put some kind of incoming power port in my electrical system that will allow me to switch the battery to mains charging and charge it from the mains.

I remember reading somewhere that while a solar panel will produce (in my case 95W) that 95W doesn’t go to the battery. In a best case scenario when the panel is producing 19v, the wattage is divided my 19. Thus 95w over 19 is actually 5A as opposed to the expected 7.9A. It’s a third less. Let’s back-calculate my power from today.

2Ah from the battery times 12v is 24 watt hours. That works out at 12 watt hours a day. That’s 1 watt of power (approx) for every hour light was striking my solar panels. That works out at 1% efficiency. That, surely, has to be some kind of practical joke! Anyway, up-converting by generously doubling it, that works out at 2% efficiency at 2 watts per hour. Divided by 12 that’s 0.16A.

I remember metering my two 30W panels and I was definitely getting at least 50W from them or as much as my charge controller would allow. Thus, I spent a massive $11 and ordered another watt meter. I want to measure input as well as output, Normally I wouldn’t bother but since the guy who seems to be some kind of electronics guru on youtube was using exactly the same meter to measure input and output with the solar controllers he was testing, I figure it’s a good equipment choice. He seems to know what he’s doing. Not only that but he used two for the very same reason I feel I need two.

I will get to the bottom of this. I’m stumbling around in the dark right now.  Now the flaw in the plan is that the charge controller has a tendency to reduce and stop accepting charge when it figures the battery is full. That will tend to skew my measurements as it will not be a measure of watts actually produced but watts accepted by the charge controller. It’s not a case of being back at square one but it’s a case of having a little more information.

Confusing matters is the fact the battery is constantly reported as having far more charge than a battery should have. Making things further difficult is that I read one answer in one place and another that’s totally the opposite somewhere else. Indeed I am reminded of the cartoon I saw some 20 years ago. A boy was holding up a report card with an F on it in red. “Whadda ya mean?... I copied it down exactly as it said on the internet!”

Tomorrow is going to be battery out day. It might also be an opportune time to add a charging port in the side of the bus so I can top up the battery without getting complicated. I figure 8 hours on a car charger then let it sit for a day should tell me all I need to know for now.