Well I am here in Kansas City, anxiously awaiting a trip out to New Mexico. I continue to plan and we have decided to Build small cabin / shed first, which will be half the size of the guest house. The plan is start small, work it out, try again a bit larger and fix issues along the way prior to starting on the final home. The cabin will be 8 x 12 feet on the interior. I will use 8" cinder blocks on a base of rubble that is 24" deep. The cinder blocks will have the webbing knocked out with rebar placed in the webbing crevices and cement poured in on top of that. Cheap fast way to build a grade beam. I wouldn't do this on the home, but figure it will work fine for a shed / cabin. Anyway, about the solar.
Since I have a plan, I have been buying a few necessities. I have a solar shower thAt I picked up for $10 and have also created a solar generator, if you will. I have 3, 90 amp hour batteries (12v DC) in parrallel, a 7amp solar charge controller, a 3000 watt (sustained) inverter and a 45 watt solar panel. it just so happens that our power to the home went out for 14hrs on Friday and I ran my big refrigerator for 6 hrs with no real issue.
In case you were wondering,divide your Amp Hour rating by 20, to determine how many amps you can push for 20 hrs prior to needing to recharge (assuming the batteries Re fully charged when you start ). For example, 1 90 amp hour battery can push 4.5 amps for 20 hrs. A 100 watt lightbulb is about 1 amp (120v/100 watts),so I could power that for 80 hours or so.
Since I have 3 90s in parallel, I add my amp hour capacity and my voltage stays @ 12v. So I have 270 amp hours to use. My panels however only replace 45watts, so I will run out at some point depending on my use. I figure this should work for me for 3 day weekends. Have fun. My next investment is a MPPT charge controller that supports 2/24/48v solar front ends and battery backends.
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