Pete Simmons
Member
- Messages
- 546
- Location
- Melbourne, FL
Yesterday watched a little of "Invention Nation" on TV.
They had a "Green" Homebuilder who was building a home completly with solar power.
He had a box van full of standard tools plus 800 pounds of lead acid batteries with inverter and solar panels on the roof.
I know I am biased (many years at Nuclear Power Plant ) and my calculation may be wrong BUT....
They had maybe 1 - 2 sq meters of Solar Collectors Total on the roof of the van.
As I understand it the good old earth recieves about 500 watts of energy per sq meter. This is a generous alotment as the numbers only decrease (distance from equator, atmosphere density, collector eff, time of day). I will be very generous and give them 100% conversion (that is about a factor of 10 generosity).
Build the whole house - I Do Not Think So! - maybe run a saw for 1-2 hours per day.
I would expect things to run well on a daily basis to film the show and you can thank the large battery bank for that.
I would be very surprised if they were not plugging the van into good old AC power at night to get a little help.
I would love to do a MythBuster type follow up to shows like these.
They just falsely lead people to believe that a couple of solar cells on the roof in bright sunny upstate New York can power the whole house.
Did I forget to mention huge additional LOSSES from the inverter and the charge/discharge cycle of the batteries.
And if Mr Green construction can get over all those problems lets discuss the energy required to build the batteries and the solar cells. After that we can start on the chemical mess of disposal of the batteries and chemicals used in the construction of the solar cells and the batteries.
To bad many of the good intentioned people who want to help our environment do not look at the bigger picture of how their "Clean Green System" really works.
They had a "Green" Homebuilder who was building a home completly with solar power.
He had a box van full of standard tools plus 800 pounds of lead acid batteries with inverter and solar panels on the roof.
I know I am biased (many years at Nuclear Power Plant ) and my calculation may be wrong BUT....
They had maybe 1 - 2 sq meters of Solar Collectors Total on the roof of the van.
As I understand it the good old earth recieves about 500 watts of energy per sq meter. This is a generous alotment as the numbers only decrease (distance from equator, atmosphere density, collector eff, time of day). I will be very generous and give them 100% conversion (that is about a factor of 10 generosity).
Build the whole house - I Do Not Think So! - maybe run a saw for 1-2 hours per day.
I would expect things to run well on a daily basis to film the show and you can thank the large battery bank for that.
I would be very surprised if they were not plugging the van into good old AC power at night to get a little help.
I would love to do a MythBuster type follow up to shows like these.
They just falsely lead people to believe that a couple of solar cells on the roof in bright sunny upstate New York can power the whole house.
Did I forget to mention huge additional LOSSES from the inverter and the charge/discharge cycle of the batteries.
And if Mr Green construction can get over all those problems lets discuss the energy required to build the batteries and the solar cells. After that we can start on the chemical mess of disposal of the batteries and chemicals used in the construction of the solar cells and the batteries.
To bad many of the good intentioned people who want to help our environment do not look at the bigger picture of how their "Clean Green System" really works.