# solar powered air pump



## limz_777 (1 Feb 2017)

still considering to try out solar power panels , seem like those cheap china made ones with built in small panels doesnt last long ? anyone using those higher wattage type panels which runs 24/7 connected to a battery to power up a airpump ?


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## zozo (1 Feb 2017)

limz_777 said:


> seem like those cheap china made ones with built in small panels doesnt last long ?


I do not know if this is typicaly true..  I live in the Netherlands and the industrial park (Avantis) is near the suburb i live. It has a solar cell factory (Solland solar cells) recently bought by the Chinese. 

But anyway to make it work, you need Solar cell power enough to do both, charge the battery and run the pump.. The battery needs to be stron enough to run the pump as long as there is no solar power.. So you need to do some calculations, what the pump uses, the batery provides and the number of cells you need to keep it all up and running. If there is no clear sky the cells capacity decreases accordingly. With only day light on a cloudy day you might need the double amount of cells to make up for it.

Here you can calculate how much you need for batery power and cells to run and charge.
http://www.solartechnology.co.uk/support-centre/calculating-your-solar-requirments

If you use a low power 6 volt air pump it uses about 0.5 amp is 3 watt x 24 = 72 watt per day..


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## martin-green (1 Feb 2017)

ZOZO has got it so right 

Unless you have big solar panels it is just not worth it just to run an air pump, and if you look at the cost of several solar panels (to make one big solar panel) its still cheaper to run the air pump via the mains.


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## limz_777 (2 Feb 2017)

still weighing the options , did some research on the pricing for a 80 watt panel hook up to charger then to a battery , quite a high initial investment , guess is the need to run the system for a couple of years  to even it out .


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## zozo (3 Feb 2017)

I know a guy working at that above factory personaly, he's an engineer working there from the start and knows all the machines etc. The factury once started as a Dutch\German joint venture they got bankrupt, sold it to an Italian and he also got bankrupt. Now he's working for the new owners the Chinese. I guess there is a valid reason why this factury always ends up bankrupt.. 

Everywhere i look i see people with a large roof and a bit of saving money putting solar panels on it. It's rather a common sight.. And one day i asked that guy, how come you working at the source, but why don't you have solar panels on your roof? He told me its still far from lucrative on such a small scale. But idn't go into further details.

The state is giving hous owners a subsidy to put solar panels on their roof to promote to use of it and nobody would if this this subsidy wasn't provided. Only then they break even after a number of years.. The power you do not use is pumped back into the grit and so when you break even you start urning money with providing other house holds with your excess energy. That's the catch... Now the fun part comes, all the people having it are lauching now thinking they will be urning money one day with their subsidized solar panels.. But the country aint stuppid, they only hush and play stuppid for now, but they already have a sneaky plan. Providing subsidy for a few decades as economical injection to pull people over the line.. When enough sheep have followed and pumping energy back into the grid, then they say "Wait a minute!? They are urning money? Then you must to pay income tax over that ..  So in the end, all these people are paying their subsidy back themselfs again.


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## LondonDragon (3 Feb 2017)

How strong do you need it to be? Just Google "solar pond oxygenator with battery backup" for some cheap options!


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## dw1305 (3 Feb 2017)

Hi all, 





zozo said:


> Providing subsidy for a few decades as economical injection to pull people over the line.. When enough sheep have followed and pumping energy back into the grid, then they say "Wait a minute!? They are urning money?


The FIT was guaranteed for 25 years in the UK, index linked for inflation. 

When we got our panels (2011) it was literally a license to print money, but the Government then halved the FIT, before effectively removing it (£0.0411 per kWh in 2016/17).

You can see our solar generation at <"Solar-log graphics">, £0.52 so far today, but more than £8 on  a good day in the summer.

cheers Darrel


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## ian_m (3 Feb 2017)

dw1305 said:


> but more than £8 on a good day in the summer.


Wow, our neighbours that paid £16,000 for their panels quite a few years back, so it would take 5 1/2 years to pay back assuming they had good summers days for 365days a year....

They were very coy about costs, but I managed to get £800 a year saving back out of them, so 20 year payback time....They have already had to fork out for a new inverter after the first one died out of warranty, £500 odd I think.

My house is 90' out for cost efficient solar panels, would need panels on both front roof and rear roof to get any form of decent sunlight. 

Makes me glad LED bulbs and getting kids to turn lights and TV and appliances off is far more money efficient.


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## zozo (3 Feb 2017)

Over here there is a simmular deal.. And it seems about 10 years you break even on the investment and then you can make some money for 10 to 15 years more before the systems lifetime is about over.. Which is a big "if". 8 pounds on a good day, sounds pretty nice tho.. I realy hope you all at least stay even in the end.. Than at least it was a nice thing to do for the invironment. Maybe.. For  me it is easy to say, don't have the issue, i'm living rented.. But looking 25 years into the future is something i would not realy believe in so much..

But once bitten twice shy i guess.. Somewhere 20 years ago the goverment said, if you like an oldtimer automobile as hobby and it is 25 years or older we do not have to pay taxes over it.. Which is a rather nice amount of money, because in our country we have a rather crooked ownership tax system on cars. So driving an oldtimer was a lucrative hobby, the tax savings could be used to keep the car running and make it even beter. And it was fun to drive around on nice weekends. The goverment called it "Keeping European automotive industry heritage alive and in respect." One day 20 years into the process 1.50.000 people owned an oldtimer in our country. Oldtimers had their value and a lot of nice rebuilded cars where still on the road.

And that was the day the goverment thought 1.50.000??? Now it's time to hit them suckers back. The spare parts where about sold out, so the car industry got rid of that in a nice way. And all of a sudden the "automotive industry heritage" respectively completely changed into "Old Crap Polluters". And because of that excuse it was no longer deemed fair to be tax free.. Do you have one, sorry mate good times are over now you have to pay what everybody pays. Do you only use it once a week? Sorry mate busted, you own one that's enough, pay up sucker!!. The market crashed, the cars went from relatively good value to scrap value.. Everybody wanted to sell and every other didn't want to buy. In my case i have to pay € 1200, extra per year for a car i seldomly drive and i can't sell it.. Well if i do i need to take 90% loss on my total investment.

You can't make a deal with something called goverment.. That's making a deal with the devil.


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## dw1305 (3 Feb 2017)

Hi all, 





ian_m said:


> Wow, our neighbours that paid £16,000 for their panels quite a few years back, so it would take 5 1/2 years to pay back assuming they had good summers days for 365days a year...


Yes, it obviously depends on all sort of factors, orientation and pitch of the roof, how large your system is etc.

You get the free electric as well, which is increasingly valuable. The cost of ours is well over half paid of since 2011.

Our roof face SE, but this is actually almost as good as S., because the panels are more efficient when they are cooler, and it is more sunny in the mornings than the afternoons on average. The best month in 2016 was actually May.

So far for ours they have been really good, and performed better than the prediction. We have a "Sunny Boy" inverter with a five year guarantee and I expect that it will fail before the full twenty-five years are up.





ian_m said:


> Makes me glad LED bulbs and getting kids to turn lights and TV and appliances off is far more money efficient


We try and do that as well. Our kitchen used to have 500W of 50W GU10 halogen spotlights. Now it has 50W of LEDs in total.

cheers Darrel


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## martin-green (3 Feb 2017)

LondonDragon said:


> How strong do you need it to be? Just Google "solar pond oxygenator with battery backup" for some cheap options!



Yes you can google it, but if you then look at what comes up. Most of them are using the same tiny solar panel and a small air pump and make exaggerated claims.

How are you going to run a solar air pump and charge a battery if you only have a 1.5watt solar panel? (Its what all that I saw have)  If you then start looking at reviews they all say pretty much the same thing, save your money.


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## zozo (4 Feb 2017)

You need a 10 amp/hour battery to run a 500Ma pump for +/- 14 hours or 20 ah to run it double the time.

So if you assume you have 5 hours of full blast sun a day, you want the battery to be charged in this time. That would leave you with at least a 20 ah battery to cover the other 19 hours. With 6 volts this is 120 watt to cover in 5 hours to charge, that would be about 30 watt cells. In very ideal conditions you still would need to add about 20% extra.. All very roughly calculated, because the battery has about 20% efficiency reservation and the charger has an efficiency loss too. And if the conditions are not ideal which they averagely are in western europe a 50 watt cell still wont keep up.

Next to that batteries have a charge cycle life time, so if constantly in use and daily recharged they can wear out significantly fast. Maybe 500 cycles are about average and the very expensive maybe double.

Take for example your notebook battery and leaf it in the notebook all the time, constantly draining and charging. Less than a year and you lost already about 75% capacity.


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## AverageWhiteBloke (4 Feb 2017)

I wish solar panels were more effective. It's something I have toyed with for the last couple of years but could never pull the trigger on based on my age where 20 years ROI and the fact I may not be living in this house by then have put me off. Essentially I would be investing in low carbon for someone else’s benefit. The solar panel salesmen will tell you anything but having smart metering gives you a lot of information to fight back with. My house runs on average 8KWH per day which annually equates to around £500 ish, the solar power salesmen tell me I would get my money back in around 5 years, I'm no mathematician but unless they are going to sell me a 8kwh system (on a good day every day) which is roughly 12 panels for about £2500 it doesn't add up. Then I have to look at the ethical decision rather than the financial and going off my last energy supplier search for quotes which was only last week I see that against my current renewal quote compared to a low co2 supplier of 100% renewable it would cost me £30.83 more per year or 59p per week to be on low co2 supply. That's something I can afford to do and feel like I'm helping in some way, I suspect if we all did that it would get cheaper and encourage more suppliers to have a higher renewable energy mix in their portfolios. Unless of course you take Trumps and his new environment ministers pov and deny its even an issue (God I hate that man)

I wish this wasn't the case but it is and the faster solar becomes more effective the better. In the meantime I, like Darrel, have changed every bulb in my house to LED and it is noticeable on my monthly energy analysis already. The bulbs are fairly cheap these days and will probably get a better ROI on the bulbs than the solar panels TBH.  Some days I often wonder if all of us and there are many decided one day, say Amanos birthday as a respect to nature decided to leave our tank lights off just for one day, post how much electric our lights would have used that day and add it all up and convert to kg's of carbon saved just to see what is possible. Let's face it I tanks could do with a breather at the best of times and one day isn't going to hurt any. I'm probably just dreaming though


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## zozo (11 Feb 2017)

This allround model, available soon.


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