stircrazy
Meat Mopper
I think you need to read up a bit more on batteries. the battery is the most important part of your whole system. while you don't need cranking amps they do need to have capacity and they need to be able to hold that capacity. a normal car battery is about the worst choice you can make as they realy have no capacity. they have an ability to do a real high discharge for a short time, then they need to be charged up again. also a normal starting battery is not ment to be discharged below 60% in normal situations and can only handle a relitivly short amount of discharges down to 30% befor the batery is useless. and finaly a starting battery is not measured in AH for storage but rather reserves. so a normal starting battery will be rated in reserve capacity and cca. CCA means nothing and RC is how many min it will hold at a 25 amp draw befor it is at 10.5V. problem is if you discharge a starting battery over 50% a few time it will lose 1/2 its storage capacity. 12.2V on a battery is about 50% so a rating that goes down to 10.5 V is useless to us.
now a true deep cycle battery is maed with thicker/larger plates and is designed to discharge over a long time. and don't confuse the marine deep cycle batterys as real ones. they are kind of a compromise built better than a car battery but not as good as a true deep cycle. True deep cycle batteries are designed to be able to discharge 80% of there capacity, where this would kill a regular battery with in a few times.
so lets compare
most large car batteries when you work it out from the Reserve capacity have about a 65 AH rating (and thats a good one) where as the smaller Deep cycles have a minimum of 80ish. so lets compare apples to apples, the 65AH of the starting is on a rating down to 10.5V so we have to shift this to get a rating that with in the working area of the battery as we don't want to destroy it the first time we use it so being optimistic and not wanting to do the math this early in the morning, I will give this a useable rating of 20AH (remember we don't want to discharge more than 40 to 50% of the totaly capicity. now our Deep cyclem is 80 AH but is designed to be able to discharge 80% of that so we are looking a usable 64AH.
I have been playing with solar pannels and batteries for a while now in RV aplications and as power for boats. the theories are all the same, so you want to get a good battery. and not a cheep deep cycle either, well they will work good but the length of there life is shorter. a normal T125 (trojan) deep cycle will last 5 to 10 years depending on how they are treated. a rolls-surett (didn't spell it right) will easily last 20 years or longer and are the most common batteries for high end off the grid systems.
there are a few things you should look at for wind power also, the most important being what is the average wind speed where you are? wind generators are kinda weird as lets say you buy a 400 watt one. it will put out 400 watt at say 16MPH wind speed, and it will put out nothing if the wind speed is below 10mph. now different ones are rated at different speeds but that is something you have to make sure it suited to your area, if your average wind speed is 12MPH it might not be worth the money you spent.
for solar hot water heating there are several systems that work well even in well below zero temps. 8000.00 is pretty pricey especialy for you guys down here. I can put the top of the line system in for about 5000.00 up here and we are usaly about 20% more expensive than you guys.
Steve
