Tales along the way in my quest to Integrate Everything.

New Life in my Solar System

When you use the term “Solar System” it sounds much more substantial than it is. Maybe that’s because when I was growing up, Solar System was a term that meant all the stars and planets in the planetary neighborhood. In my case, it simply refers to a photovoltaic cell on the roof of my garage, a couple of batteries, some electronics I put together and some lights in my garden. None the less, whatever the scope or size of said system, mine just got a lot bigger.

Yesterday I bought a pair of SRM-27 deep cycle lead acid batteries to replace the hodge-podge set of batteries I had been using to store the sun’s energy during the day and to light up my garden at night. Quite possibly a trivial pursuit, but this was really the first [real] money I have invested into the project where most of the parts were either specials on Aliexpress or freebies that fell off of trucks.

Now I will have to compare power graphs of the system, which measures the voltage and current on the batteries and the solar panel, logging all the metrics to Venturii for my storage and analysis. Considering that I had been using a worn out car battery and a pair of 12V 7AH SLA’s to run less than 2 amps of lighting for ~8 hours a night, I think it was doing alright. Actually, I am quite curious now to see what the difference will be in capacity and charging cycles. I have a proper charger with a plug-in backup at the ready to make sure these deep cycles get their proper conditioning, but really – it is all more data for me to absorb and study. 😉

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