Costing out a small, rural solar panel installation

[Justin]

Interesting; sort of wondering how much shipping adds to the overall bill.
I figure batteries would be best sourced local to cut down on shipping costs.

Add in some supper caps to provide for the high startup surge on some appliances...

Interestingly enough, I know a guy who replaced one of the batteries in his truck with a bank of super capacitors. Pretty cool stuff.

[Grant H.]

Interestingly enough, I know a guy who replaced one of the batteries in his truck with a bank of super capacitors. Pretty cool stuff.

I did it with my motorcycle.

Probably building a pair of bigger banks for my brothers diesel.

Super caps are pretty slick, but they have their limitations. Their self discharge is much higher than a normal battery, so they have to be used more frequently or they have to be trickle charged between use.

Their capacity is limited, and rather expensive, but they have their uses.

[Justin]

So the installation of a solar array was brought up at the last board meeting, but the decision was made to stick with using the generator. Not totally surprised with the outcome, but everyone's input here was helpful in discussing the issue.

[bradbn4]

For simple setup and short term use a good generator is hard to beat. I could see getting one or two panel setup to support keeping an electric start generator's batteries topped off.

For a friend of mine in Texas I keep saying you should get a small setup to handle the mundane stuff for one of the outbuildings. Nothing over the top, but something useful to help out in a pinch. They keep wanting the setup to do more, so it costs more, so they opt out of the project. I even offered to pickup part of the tab just to see how well it would perform in a real world setup.

I am happy some place like http://sunelec.com/home/ is not in the Colorado back yard, otherwise I would be tempted in setting up a one or two battery solar fun project for summer use.