I won't bore you with the details of my up and coming grow but the basics is a large custom built underground room powered by sun and wind only. Now for a starting project, I would like to piece together numerous solar panels from inside some garden walkway lights. I would like to link these up to some red and white bike lights. This is not to grow my plants entirely, but to grow one from seed for anything up to 14 days as an experiment. Has anyone seen any solar, wind or other renewable energy powered grow who can give me advice on what type panels to buy or make or direct me to any useful links on the internet?
Well my first thought when i read this is. Your gonna need a metric ton of those little garden light to create 1 solar panel that MAY be able to power 1 light, while its sunny. I dont think they are built to work with deep cycle batteries, so creating a storage for night use i dont think is in the cards, Also you have to remember those light use 1-4 LED lights in them so the power consumption is literately nothing. Solar panels arnt a walk in the park, use the wrong battery to store the energy the recharging and charging will kill the battery on you (need to use a marine or deep cycle and they arnt cheap at all). Also the regulator that allows the battery to change and expel energy cost ALLOT of money (works much like a standard capacitor but it allows the energy to be controlled coming in and going out). As for the solar panel its self they sell them at a Big Box here called princess auto 130w for 500$. Now again that isnt nearly enough to power a single light alone you would have to have a pretty decent size bank of battery's. Also the biggest problem your going to have (I dono where you live so i dont know if the law is the same) but here in Ontario if we own a solar panel over 50w we have to have it registered with out local power distributed and it has to be tied into the power grid, witch is a whole bunch of BS because now your not really hiding anything.
Look at any outdoor grow... they're all solar powered grows. I don't think the solar cells on the lights will be strong enough and you'll need a lot of those, which will get really expensive pretty quickly. If you invested in a real solar panel and good LEDs I'm sure it'd work really well. As good as any other energy system. I don't think it'd be worth the cost if you didn't use the proper equipment.
I have looked into this. Caution a lot of math went into this. A single 1000w light draws 10.2 kw hours of energy per day. For solar you are only going to be averaging full power for about five hours a day without a sun tracker. So without boring you with a lot of math you will need about 25,000 watts worth of solar panels. Quality solar panels can be had for about $1/ watt. So roughly $25,000 plus installation to run one light. And that doesn't include batteries or a power inverter. Which the inverter runs about $1200 Edit: Your best bet would be to go Grid Tie instead of totally off grid. That way you will save money on your electric bill. And you can start small, and slowly add to the system till you can be completely independent of the Grid. But if you are starting this in a secluded area where you don't have electricity then you would be forced to use the above scenario. And beware the deep cycle batteries aren't cheap either.