Weekly Wednesday Meetings are from 6-8 p.m.
at 113 East Logan Ave., Gallup, NM
Refreshments are served
The public is welcome and all input is valued.
For more information call 505-726-2497
September 4, 6-8pm
September 11, 6-8pm
September 18, 6-8pm
September 25, 6-8pm
Gallup Solar Board Meeting
In August we assigned ourselves the goal of designing a syllabus. All Gallup Solar (GS) installations are understood to be training sessions for students, entrepreneurs, interested parties and Solar Seekers.
We will work with our educator, Chris Chavez, to create a learning experience that includes PV installation, safety sessions, and basic electrical concepts and skills.
We felt that an installation/training should be completed in 3 sessions, the second two days would be the installation itself but the first should teach some basic solar electricity. Eddie Munoz agreed to try it…..
"Kill the Bill"
The lingo we would love to speak
and a darn good reason to go solar!
Eddie Munoz, son of Mayor Munoz and brother of the State Senator, gave a presentation to Gallup Solar on Solar Electricity.
Eddie is coming from a world that
wants solar. He hasn’t had to plead the cause as we do every day and it was refreshing. He installs off-grid systems for down and upscale off-gridders, including Navajos who have fully wired houses that were never hooked up to NTUA
(Navajo Tribal Utility Authority).
For state of the art systems Eddie may install a solar power center such as this from Outback.
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/inverter-system/outback-power-flexPower-solar-power-center-fp1-1.html
The power center includes an inverter, charge controller, control module and display, communications manager, remote temp sensor, prewired AC and DC boxes, surge protector, and breakers. And you still have to buy the panels and batteries but you may make up the entire $3900 cost by not having to hire an electrician.
Highlights quoted from Eddie’s talk
On Batteries
A deep cell battery from Walmart might be ok for a cabin with a few LED lights, the trick to making them last longer is not to take it down to the 59 percent mark. The more you hit bottom on a battery the more life you are taking out of it. That even applies to the special ($700) Solar Batteries that can be drawn down 80 percent. They can last for 30 years. On the nicer systems you can set that limit.
Never mix old and new batteries because the entire system will go down to the weakest link.
If you are grid tied and want battery back up they make these little rolling boxes that you just plug in your wall to charge it up when you have a power outage. You can just roll them over to you refrigerator or your freezer and keep it running for two or three days.
On Charge Controllers
You can get a charge controller that has four stages: the
bulk stage where its dumping as much power as it can get from the panels; once it gets to about 85% full it goes into
float stage which is a reduced amount of power, not pushing it so hard; then
trickle stage where its going really slowly at a couple of amps to top it off to get it full; in the fourth stage it actually
scrubs your battery, what that does is throw a whole bunch of power into a full battery and for 10 minutes it causes the acid to start churning keeping it from stratifying inside the battery. The bubbles scrub off the sulfur deposits that are starting to form on the lead plate. The controller will do that on a weekly or monthly basis depending on how the system is set up.
Planning for Sunless Winter Days
Even the best systems may go down a couple of times during short sunless days of winter. So turn off the TV and stop doing laundry until it’s over. Ed suggests that a generator of equivalent voltage to the system be purchased to charge up the batteries to keep the essentials (refrigerator) going. But do not use the generator to run appliances, as many do, racking up huge gas bills, money that could be invested in solar, and wearing out a generator in a year or two.
In sub-zero temperatures and with snow solar production can spike to 150 %, and overpower your inverter, so buy a big enough one.
Sizing Systems is Key
Solar Koan: Bigger needs for swamp coolers and air conditioners in the summer are balanced out by short days in the winter.*
If you have an annual figure, a bill, for kwh (kilowatt hours) used you divide that by the 305 sunny days we get every year and divide that again by the 5.5 hours of sunlight we get every day and that will give you the kwh average daily use. GJU (Gallup Joint Utilities) shows the monthly average and that can be divided by 30 days and 5.5 hours per day. Alternatively you can list all your appliances, the watts they use and the amount of time they are on.
Once you figure out your usage the next step is to figure out how you can reduce it before investing in solar.
On DC/AC
Solar Panels produce DC (Direct Current). They harvest electrons with sandwiches of sliced silicon, one positive and one negative and a copper junction between them. One efficient use of DC current is pumping water, pumping continuously while the sun shines, no need for batteries or charge controller. It’s called Direct Couple. Although you can buy DC appliances, (there is a DC refrigerator that uses almost nothing, 150 watts) most homes use AC (Alternating Current) for everything. The grid is AC.
On Inverters
An Inverter turns the DC to AC. When you are tied to the grid your inverter has to match the sine wave that the grid is putting out. The inverter will sense the wave and match it automatically. The new micro inverters have a
gateway that will tell your computer (or your cell phone) how much power each panel is making. This $600 option is valuable because otherwise each panel has to be tested to find a malfunction.
For off-gridders, to protect your electronic equipment get a pure sine wave inverter not a step inverter that will jar your equipment.
And that’s just some of the info he conveyed.
For more info from Eddie call him at
505-307-9610
*a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment
RIDE THE FUTURE,
a caravan of all electric vehicles crossing America, was referred by Gallup Solar, to Fitz Sargent, who has grid-tied 1.5KW on his roof. (Gallup Solar can only support solar charging of e-vehicles) But in spite of many trips to Gallup Lumber an approved connection was not found.
Unfortunately, unlike many other cities, Gallup does not have a recharging station downtown. In the end the Nissan Leaf, motorcycle, scooter, & electric bikes had to re-charge at the RV Park west of town.
But it only made Gallup Solar more determined to get a car charging station right down town on Sol Street. GS is writing a proposal to the downtown Business Investment District to have one installed.
To hear mp3 interviews with each driver go to...........
Photos by Sister Rose Marie Cecchini
CALL DON TODAY AT 505-726-2497 IF YOU WANT SOLAR!
OR IF YOU WANT TO BE INFORMED OF THE NEXT SOLARON TRAINING.
