Brand new to the world of solar power... trying to understand the basics.

[solidstudjimusa]

Ok, i'm new to this entire thing. I looked around my house and clearly noticed that I have awesome sun around, and on my house through out the entire day. I've looked up several things, and have seen formula after formula... and it is not registering, my friends... not a bit. so I need to figure out how to power something that i have operating right now. I have a dehumidifier, that runs 24 hours a day. probably not necessary for it too, but for my question, we'll go with it. the sticker on the side that gives the amps and the watts are as follow:

Amps= 4.8
watts= 450

I run it 24 hours a day.

so my questions start there, and are as follow:

what kind of battery would it take to power it for 24 hours?
what kind of solar panel would i need to keep that battery going?
how may of them do i need?
what kind of inverter would i need?
what kind of charge controller would need?

I know that is a lot of questions, but if i can have this real life everyday situation explained, it would help me greatly in understanding.

PLEASE HELP haha thanks for looking!!

[russ]

450*24 = 10,8 kWh/day

Large system and massive batteries = very expensive.

Energy intensive items like heating, cooling and dehumidifying are not good choice for PV

[solidstudjimusa]

sorry to keep throwing questions out there.

Thanks Russ!!!! now what i do to figure kWh/day is times the watt by the hours of the day, or usage time and that gives me kili-watt hours? and PV? so lets go a different route with my original question. What if all i Needed to do is power that dehumidifer for one hour a day? that would be 450*1= 450 kWh. is that more doable?

[Sunking]

Watt Hours = watts x hours. To generate 450 watts x 24 hours = 10,800 wh for a battery system means you have to generate 16,000 to 20,000 watt hours per day. Assuming you run it year round would take about a 6000 watt solar panel and regardless of where you live will require a 3300 pound battery the size of your car. You are looking at around a $33,000 system to just run your humidifier, and $7500 of that is for the battery you get to replace every 5 years or less. Your humidifier alone uses more power than the average US home uses.

[solidstudjimusa]

thank you and help

"Watt Hours = watts x hours. To generate 450 watts x 24 hours = 10,800 wh for a battery system means you have to generate 16,000 to 20,000 watt hours per day. Assuming you run it year round would take about a 6000 watt solar panel and regardless of where you live will require a 3300 pound battery the size of your car. You are looking at around a $33,000 system to just run your humidifier, and $7500 of that is for the battery you get to replace every 5 years or less. Your humidifier alone uses more power than the average US home uses."

so how would you figure that i would need 16,000 to 20,000 watt hours a day? more so, how would i figure out what kind of panel i would need?

[Mike90250]

Watt Hours = watts x hours. To generate 450 watts x 24 hours = 10,800 wh for a battery system means you have to generate 16,000 to 20,000 watt hours per day.
Assuming you run it year round would take about a 6000 watt solar panel ...

The daily requirement to replace the battery power, is about 2x using the general rule of thumb. To account for all the in-efficencies of recharging, harvesting, running the appliance and inverter losses, we generally figure 2x the consumed power.
My sister lives in VA, so I know they don't need the dehumidifer in the winter, but they use wood heat too - so maybe that's a difference. Winter has short days, and less time to recharge the batteries, so you need more panel to acomplish 24/7 running the dehumidifer. This is expensive.

You can bypass the batteries and use a "Grid Tie" system, if your utility allows it. This would feed daylight power into your meter, and slow it down, reducing your electric bill, and no batteries to mess with. A small generator provides backup power if you need it.

But you are still talking thousands of dollars

[Sunking]

so how would you figure that i would need 16,000 to 20,000 watt hours a day?

Because battery systems on average are 50% efficient. So if you use 10 Kwh, you need to generate 20 Kwh.

more so, how would i figure out what kind of panel i would need?

By factoring out the watts from watt hours. To do that you need to know the Sun Hours of the shortest day it will be used which is usually winter. That number will be between 1 an 4 hours depending on location Watts = Watt Hours / Hours. So if you only have 2 Sun hours to generate 20 Kwh then 20,000 wh / 2 h = 10,000 watts. Simple grade school algebra.