Learning Solar
There are many things that we are having to pick up along the way here in Cameroon: culture, language, living in a village, bad roads, but one of the most daunting (and that is saying something) has been learning about solar powered systems for our house.
At one point, I had learned the basic equations for electricity involving ohms, volts, watts, and amps, but that knowledge is long gone and getting it back is not like hopping back on a bicycle. So over the last couple months, I have been investigating inverters, charge controllers, meters, high-energy efficient freezers, deep-cycle batteries, solar panels and a myriad of other components to educate myself on our future electrical life-line.
Now without giving you a complete drawn out picture of all the technical aspects (which I am still learning about), I will give a simple list of some of the components for those who might be interested.
- 135W Kyocera solar panels
- Universal 110-amp hour deep-cycle batteries
- Xantrex charge controller and digital meter
These are the 3 major components I have settled on so far and the fourth, an inverter, is yet to be purchased. Hope this interests some of the nerdier ones out there. The last thing I want to say is that if you have ever considered solar power at your home, now is the time to use it. They now have grid tie panels with built in connectors, so the technical aspect has never been easier and if you don’t want to have to deal with your own charge controller/battery bank, you can just sell your power to the electric company in many areas. Just food for thought.
