Re: Solar power lamp

"Steve" <steviephilips@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:ec992cf3-3881-42e2-a8e3-f025956a8455@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 7 Jun, 21:19, "Stephen Rainsbury" <step...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -
wrote:

Although if your requirements for power when away from the mains are
modest (such a lighting) and short term (a coupe of weeks) then
storing the energy in a lead acid battery makes a lot more sense.

Agreed, although I have been thinging about making a steam turbine :)

I am waiting for Lidl to do those car starter power pack thingies,
seen them in the shops, but they are anything from £35 to £60, but I
seem to recall Lidl did them quite cheaply.

My unit has one and I bought one for me too, I think they were £25 from Aldi. These are 17Ah although many are less than that.

We got over 100 second hand lead acid gel batteries from the local burglar/fire alarm company, who swap them at customers site as part of a service contract. Being a profesional outfit they had dated each battery with purchase date, installtion date and removal date! We only wanted the little ones (1.2Ah, 2.7Ah) for our robots but we also had a pile of 7Ah ones which ewre too heavy for the bots so we took them to the dump... dohh!

I am considering going back there to see if they would give us another batch. Ideally I would like to build them into plastic tool box with room to stroe the strip lights on top, and some fancy way of connecting between the batterries without needing to kep moving the spade connectors. Possibly banna plug patch panel?

OK so we would need to charge them up before we went (again via the banna plug) but I have chargers and could do two each night.

Even if the bateries only lasted two years it would be recycling in action. In pI did wonder about ractice I still have some which must be 8 years old now and they are still working well.

I did wonder about trying something creative with 1W Luxeon LEDs and the smaller Led Acid gel cells, in theory you should get about 15 hours light out of each one.

These are touted as being useful;

http://www.selectsolar.co.uk/pics/rollable.php

As a power source for charging all those modern gadgets we seem to
have, but then I realise that a spare mobile phone battery cost about
£4 and weighs about 20g.

That looks interesting, but you are right, my new phone is quite happy to only be charged once a week if it isn't used much, and 20 minutes charge each day going to the shops would keep it topped up. I already have 4 sets of cells for my camera, and my PDA uses AAA. The only thing I have that needs mains is my razor, that used to be re-chargeable 20 years ago and would last a week, and in practice I could use a socket in the toilets, if I hadn't chopped the two pin plug off and put a 3 pin one on!

Plus as I said we already have the two yellow boxes, and a 100W invertors so we don't actually need anything else apart from communal lighting for the kids tents.

--
Stephen Rainsbury
ESL Agathoid Explorer Scout Unit
www.agathoid.org.uk(remove this bit)



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