Buying a single large battery surely has many benefits !! One could make a bank of batteries, but KNOW that this comes with various other issues, ie keeping the batteries balanced. THIS accounts for about 40A.h during a load shed !!!! Thus on load shed days use the lights sparingly or you will drastically reduce the battery life !! And THIS is why Pieter is trying to source a larger 12V battery. PS – once you have a deep cycle battery you will add an inverter for the tv/computer. Hoppy’s 24 off 3W LED lights only draw 6A. With a typical 100A.h deep cycle battery you could use 50Ah over a period of about 5 hours, thus a 10A draw. Make no mistake, that IS a lot of light for backup purposes, though you wont be reading under these lights. This could be 6 downlighters, or about 1,5m of 14W/m LED strip (remember you CAN use a number of small strips to total up to this 1,5m). That is a constant 1,5A draw, or about 18W. IF you use the 7A.h battery – you could expect to use about 3A.h per load shed and not damage the battery. Better still if the battery capacity is such that you only draw 10% per night. – if you only draw 10% of the battery capacity per night you could reasonably expect to get 5 000 cycles from it, or more that 10 years !ĬONLUSION – your battery capacity SHOULD be more than DOUBLE the nightly current draw. – if you use 50% of the capacity each night you may reasonably expect to get 1000 cycles out of this AGM battery (this would be between 5 cycles for a deep cycle battery) Graphs from the following website – īasically this graph states the following : Add 1 or 2 kids and the power draw WILL drastically increase.įor the purpose of this thread I will be using conventional wisdom. NOTE – this is for a household with TWO people. Thus our system draws maybe 12Ah on a long winters night. The bedrooms draw maybe another 1Ah per night. The 12V lights here draws another 5A.h per winter night The current draw is thus : (3+1)x1,4 = 5,6A.h During winter this light is used roughly 3 hours at night and another 1 hour in the morning. Kitchen – 1,2m of 14W/m high bright LED strip. OR do you want to switch over a few rooms completely to 12V lighting ? WHAT do you want to do with your 12V lights ?Ī couple of LED strips and one or two downlighters purely to provide emergency lighting ? There are a number of technical bits to consider when selecting your components : The other approach may look something like this –ġ00Ah battery with a 220V and/or PV charger system. When eskom takes a brake the unit automatically switch over to the battery and your light wont even know the power went off. When 220V is supplied to the unit, the light is powered from the 220V source and the battery remains fully charged. But you connect the light (load) directly to the charger unit. This specific charger system makes it a VERY versatile solution !! You connect 220V to the charger, then connect it to the battery. The cost effective load-shed-buster system may well look like this – There are just so many things that determine what will work for YOU : Never have there been a topic more hotly debated than what battery to use and how to use it. Now to power the 12V lights when eskom takes time off to count their profits …. Yes, many downlighters have been 12V for years already, but powered from 220V. Long long ago in an era before candles, in fact in a time before a uniquely african thing called “load shedding” we had the option of using transformers to power 12V light systems. Not sure if this should be a separate thread, or if we should rather keep all the info together …. This is an excerpt from ChrisF’s post on the Hilux forum:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |