frugal living 15

FRUGAL LIVING 15

UTILITIES

ELECTRICAL ( continued )

For a battery, look at the cold amp rating.  Say, 600.  A good rule of thumb is that this rating is about the number of watts you can drain from the battery until the charge is half gone ( try not to go below that, to elongate battery life.  Marine batteries are designed to drain and charge repeatedly, but best not to drain below half if you can help it.  Regular car batteries are only 20% less expensive and you will kill it quick by draining it in a home electrical system.  USE marine types.  Many folks insist on special batteries like 6v or golf car or forklift batteries.  For a small system, these are unnecessary ).  Try to keep your battery from freezing, and check the water level no later than every three months ( use distilled water.  If you keep the jug in a cupboard-avoid any sunlight-it should last long enough for you to get your 89 cents worth ).  I buried a Styrofoam cooler to its lid and put the battery in there after punching a hole for the wires.  I’m assuming there is no freezing.  I did forget the water issue for some time, and the battery let me know about it.  Every time I plugged my computer into the inverter ( the box that turns your 12v DC into 120 AC current for those devices designed to plug into a wall socket ), the watts being used showed a huge variation.  Once I topped off the water, and after a few days to-I guess-stabilize itself- the usage was normal again. 

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If you are in an RV, you just hook up to the RV battery wires.  I used those for the longest time, but I hated the battery being uninsulated.  My solution was to take an old pair of jumper cables and go from the buried battery to the clamps up in the RV battery box.  If you are wiring a Unabomber Shack, you just need two pairs of wire, for the positive and negative terminals.  Also, an RV light socket simplifies things ( or, us a car bulb socket ).  I got a roll of 4 ply wire at Wal-Mart in the auto section.  I think they were meant for a stereo system.  You don’t need them color coded white and red or whatever, just don’t mix up which color is + and which is -.  I separated the wires, attached by the insulation.  That way I get something like a hundred feet of a pair of wires.  Not that wire is cheap anymore.  At the battery end, attach those O ring thingies to the wire, then put that on the small post of the battery.  You can stack them more than one on, plus the wires from the panels and the wires going out to the sockets can use the same post.  Wire to the inside ( you don’t charge a battery inside-toxic fumes ) to your bulb socket ( whatever size bulb, find the equivalent white LED bulb at Amazon or the RV store.  Mine was $12 and only uses 4 watts- a bargain compared to incandescent bulbs which might be fifty cents but use twenty watts ). 

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You can attach to yet another socket for more than one light, just like they do in an RV.  Just hook another set of wires from one socket to another.  On some sets of wires, you can hook up a cigarette lighter socket to use lots of different 12v appliances ( my TV has a cigarette lighter plug ).  Get from an auto parts store.  On wiring, once you leave the battery, go from larger to smaller wiring.  Don’t go from small to large.  I don’t know if that is a “thing”, but my stuff never worked doing that.  Also, I have no idea if you can plug too much stuff in at once.  I have two lights and one cigarette plug going at any one time, no more than 20 watts.  I’m not sure what the max is.  Also, I tried three different inverters for a 35 watt computer.  The 60 and 100 watt inverter refused to work.  I needed a 200 or a 400 watt one ( $40 at Wal Mart ).  Not sure why that was.  The point is, you don’t need to really know much to get this thing to work.  It’s a panel(s) to a battery to a few sockets and an inverter ( the inverter comes with several hook-ups, one which is to the big battery posts, so that keeps it out of the way of the other wires ).  And not much else.  Remember, in the winter you get less energy on your panel than in summer.  Mine is about half.  So, using five hours a night for one light, and an hour of TV, I use about one hours electricity ( 70 watts, 35 in the winter ).  If I go a week without sun, I still recharge the battery after a full sunny day.  But I could go almost three weeks without draining the battery below half.  More on appliances and power draw in other sections.

END

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