Guru
Joined: 03/06/2019
Location: AustraliaPosts: 1586
| Posted: 03:28am 26 Aug 2019 |
I see now that windmills have pretty much gone by the wayside and being replaced by these Direct solar Pumps. Same as in India and parts of asia where the " traditional" Lister/ Petter and and Yanmar type Diesel clones are also being replaced with solar.
The gubbermints are subsidising the initial cost but the lack of running costs would seem to make repayment of the investment very worthwhile.
Also in a lot of these places there is no power so having the solar gives the owners the ability to charge batteries or run a cable to their house so they can have Radio, TV and lights with a battery.
I don't know how these work exactly, Judging by the array sizes they don't seem to be 24 or low voltage and on the vids I have seen they seem to kick out plenty of water so must be at least in the 1-2Kw range.
Would seem this controller would be no different to using a VFD or speed controller that runs on PWM which I have a couple of I use.
Just waiting on a couple more components and to finish working on the new Kitchen and I hope to build my controller.
Ironically, one of the ideas I had for the controller turned out to be a bit over estimated.
I put 25L of water in a drum in an old Fridge to provide a thermal mass for raising seedlings. I put 4x 175W panels on a 3.6Kw element. I boiled the water with the sunny days we had so have had to back it off to 2 panels and then it's still probably a bit on the warm side. Think I'll have to add a little thermostat for control.
I saw a few things on the net by a guy that made a controller and was heating 6 gallons of water. That's about 25L so not sure why anyone would go to the trouble of the controller when even such an inefficient system will do the job. Spose it might be different if there was a lot of cloudy weather but you could heat a Lot more water than 6 Gal with a controller in any case.
My holiday house only has a 30L HWS and that barely lasts 1 shower. At least being on mains it re heats in under an hour so not a big problem but I'll certainly replace it with a 125L when it falls over.