Anyone with some tech advice on how to design a solar powered inline fan system for a small balcony greenhouse? Is it even possible? Here is my idea so far: Solar panel - battery - timer - inline fan Thanks for all your help!
I think you'll need something in there to convert the battery's DC current into AC current to run the fan.
can you find any links to one of these fans? I had no luck finding them. I really don't know where to begin when it comes to setting something like this up. I would love a premade system, but if someone knew how to make one I could do that as well.
What this guy said. Solar is just really inefficient right now, and probably will stay that way, there hasnt been any reasonable break through's in a while. I have installed solar panels on gas stations, they are 99% PR as they barely run the canopy lights. But there is hope. Get yourself a 12 volt DC inline fan. You will get significantly better results if you stay DC when fucking with solar. So get a couple of deep cycle marine batteries, set them up in series with your solar panels. Get the sailboat solar panels made for trickle charging. That will work. I just saw where dude said they have solar power fans at lowes, I gotta see this... that would obviously potentially rock.
I would love to install panels on my roof so that I wouldn't have to pay an electric bill ever again. Thing is that it would cost almost twice as much as I paid for my house to lay enough panels to offset my electricity consumption. There are still plenty of state and federal grants available that would help to offset the cost, but it would still cost me tens of thousands of dollars to set up.
I built a "state of the art" gas station in the LA area several years ago. It is covered with solar panels, It was a PR move but the engineers expected it to run the station during the daytime. Not even close. It ran the canopy lights just fine, and the ATM. But whenever we tried to run anything else off them it just fluctuated too much. Then the size of the capacitor needed to stabilize it killed it. Last I was there, in 2005, I was there only as a customer and to look at the old gal the solar panels were still there an apparently running the ATM only at this point, during the daytime. Apparently the maintenance offset the value of running the canopy lights. I want to say it was over 200,000 in solar panels.
They wanted to offset light, during the day, using solar panels which are inefficient and not the sun. Why didn't they install sunlights? To the original poster, you can use a DC fan and have it automatically turn on when the solar panel gets to power or have a photo-resistive/diode circuit to turn it on when the sun hits it.
Thanks for all your help everyone. I think it should work with the 12v marine panels to the batteries. would it be easier to have a photo-resistive/diode circuit or just have it trickle charge and run whenever theres enough power? Thanks again for everyones help!