I’ve seen a lot of videos going up lately on YouTube talking about Solar Power in winter. Some claim it sucks and some claim its great. I think it all has to do with location, location, location…
I am in Pennsylvania, 45 minutes north of Pittsburgh roughly. About a latitude of 41*…
My solar meter readings are on average from about an hour after sunrise until around 4pm est. hovers around 13.45 during winter months. On real cloudy days it drops to around 12.75 or so. But on average I see my daily charge rate of 13.45 here in winter.
My peak hours are mid day about 11am-2pm est. where I generally have my battery banks topped off by then and am sitting in dump mode. During these hours on clear days we hit upwards of 17.5 on our Diversion controller. On cloudy days we hit around 14-15 give or take.
What we need are more batteries. We currently only have 400ah worth of AGM batteries so we cannot store all the power we collect throughout the day and sadly waste more than we use. Someday we hope to get more AGM batteries.
Here is a video of today’s power highs. I show the Diversion controller and then the solar panels and ramble a bit about the weather and our firewood usage…
Here is our MW&S Diversion controller…
Here is a picture of our monocrystalline solar panels…
This is a sunny picture of our SunForce Wind Turbine and my finger 🙂 …
And here is a picture of our back up 5K watt gas generator for those pesky no sun no wind days…
So there you have it folks. Pennsylvania mid winter solar and wind power in the woods. 🙂
Nothing like having a stockpile of firewood. If your power demands are met so be it, folks tend to be greedy looking for convenience via appliances. If the essential power needs for communication are met, ample LED light at night–life’s good. Refrigeration units–is that a future goal?
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Eventually a freezer would be nice and if calculations are correct we need a 100ah battery and a 150watt solar panel plus controller and inverter to make an independent 7 cubic foot chest freezer system separate from the house power setup. maybe by end of the year. We currently have 300watts but if we had 500 to 600watts then everything we want would easily be powered. More batteries right now is our main concern.
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I still can’t view your videos on your WordPress website… Any Help Please?
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There isn’t anything I can do about it sorry. Everyone else seems to be able to watch them just fine. I talked to wordpress and I’ve looked at every aspect. It has to be on your end. Perhaps try a different player or maybe you have the cookies blocked or something.
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My little off grid cabin gets less than 5 hours of sun in the winter but my electricity needs are minimal other than my ham radio and TV. I found that my limited winter sunlight when aided by my generator works quite well… then again I can’t even run a coffee pot in the winter and have to switch over to tea. I think adjustments to ones lifestyle can be made by anyone who truly wants to live off grid to match whatever electricity produced.
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Very true. My wife and I have very little need for electricity. The only thing we would like to add is a small freezer and we will be happy. Just need 100 watts more and another battery dedicated to it and I think we can make it happen. If we doubled our current battery bank we would have an abundance of power we never used.
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Hey Doc good to see your system is still working great! My wife and I are just getting through our first winter off-grid in Vermont! We have four 100 watt Renogy panels. We are working on more panels so we can run a refrigerator. I think we may have too many batteries at the moment – six V-Max charge tanks at 155Ah each, run in parallel.
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Good to hear you are doing good. Wish we had twice as many batteries so we could store more power. We dump most of it. Not quite enough for a freezer but to much for our battery bank lol…
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