Earlier in the day I was cutting the hedge with this powerpack, about 30 minutes of run time. Then I left the laptop plugged into it for 3 hours playing terrestrial antenna HDTV (pretty cpu intensive work), and it was pretty awesome to note how long it had lasted. Mine you, it draws watts out of the house and takes about 18hrs to fully charge.
Which got me thinking about solar panels. Canadian Tire offers a direct plug-in solar panel made to charge this battery pack:
So right now I'm trying to do the math. This solar panel gives 15W of power per hour. The Eliminator 800 for a full charge requires 800W of power. That means it takes just under 54hrs for a full charge. We can guestimate the equivalent of 6hrs of full sun during the day, which means it will take 9 days for this battery pack to fully charge.
The solar panel costs $100, and I use the battery pack maybe once a week. Its a simple solution because the solar panel is made to be portable and hardy. If I want to lock it down, there are a number of solar panel resellers in Ontario that sell 40W for 200$. Which means it takes 20hrs instead of 54hrs to fully charge the unit, which is just over 3 days. That's pretty optimal, since it takes the battery 18hrs to charge, the fastest you can really charge it is 3 days x 6hrs.
;)
The cheapest solution I considered was to make a 20W solar panel using broken solar cell pieces:
For the electronic hobbyist, this can be a lot of fun. You need a bunch of solar cells, preferably the same type of cell and good energy yield still - you have to shop around as most people sell mixed. You'll need:
- flux resin (?) which apparently allows you to link solar cells together
- solder and copper wiring
- a plexiglass casing and roof bindings
- and a lot of time.
I saw some solar cell distributors selling the broken cells for around 15$ a set - which averaged 7-10W in working solar cells, and there is no real limit to your creativity at this price.
So what the heck does 800W of power look like? That was my initial question, what could I comfortably run with this Eliminator / Solar setup on a regular basis? Get a power meter:
These things are pretty awesome. It will give you statistical readouts of the amount of energy a plugged in appliance is using. I also see no reason you can't plug a powerbar in with multiple appliances if you're running something in a set: lamps, internet setup, computer setup, home entertainment system. I found it interesting that if you were on your laptop playing a video game vs using a word processor, you can see a significant difference in the amount of power drawn.
One person even reduced the amount of video games he played to lower his electricity bill, now that's thinking :)
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