On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 15:33:27 -0800, "RST Engineering"
wrote:

With a small solar panel to keep the continuous load going, not a bad way to
go.

I recently talked to a guy down in Florida, where the sun is more
direct and shows up much more often than here in Michigan. He said a
decent solar powered system to run a medium size (what's medium size?)
house was about $20,000 for the installation.

You can plan on replacing lead acid batteries about every 3 years or
so. Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) are about the same, except the car
manufacturers are claiming much longer life using computer controlled
charging. Time will tell.

Solar panels are still darned expensive. Using a mix of solar and
wind you charge different banks with solid state regulators and
switches.

The inverter only needs to be sized large enough to handle the
expected load. As long as you are not running electronics the wave
form is not much of a problem...except... for radio interference. Some
switching supplies (which are very efficient) are very noisy.

You can get one whale of a nice liquid cooled Honda Generator that
runs quiet and will supply enough juice to run a good size house
continuously. I have a 9,500 Watt continuous generator that will
power our whole house on about a gallon an hour. Maybe a tad less. It
burns way less than the little 4400 watt portable I used to have and
it is *much* quieter. Unfortunately I spend $1,200 and it's not a
quiet Honda. OTOH fortunately I purchased it from Lowe's a couple of
weeks after the Y2K fiasco. People had cleaned them out and were then
returning the "unused" generators. They finally said "No more". Some
of those "unused" generators looked like they'd been sitting out in
salt spray for a couple of months. Mine was more than 50% off and it
was still in the box. It was one of the few that they hadn't sold.
They had a lot of them cheap for a few months. The one store here in
town must have had 50 or more although most of them weren't 9500 watt
units.

Currently Home Depot has some 15KW "home generators" complete with
transfer switch that will do an automatic transfer, as well as
exercising once a week. They'll run on Gas, Natural Gas, or LP gas
and come in a small enclosure that looks like a whole house air
conditioner. I'd like to try one of those, but my wife says I spent
more than enough on what we have and we can drag that heavy cable out
to the generator shed for a lot less than $2,200 :-))

Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com



Jim

Seems running a generator would be simpler and cheaper.



Roger