 Good evening, guys. Good evening. I was asked to give a little presentation tonight on solar, and I'll try to keep it brief. I'm going to slant it towards it being one element of preparedness. I'm not going to talk about big solar farms and all that kind of stuff. I'm talking about each individually and how this might be a nice piece in your preparedness toolkit. So that's my slant. Why solar power? Basically because it, set up right, can be available. The grid goes down. By the grid, I mean hammer and U.E. or whoever you buy electricity from, whoever, whoever. That should go down and go away. Well, this is a way to have some electrical power. And furthermore, it needs no fuel. We have generators that help us out in a pinch when power goes out for a few hours or maybe even a few days. But if it were to go out for months, you'd soon be out of fuel and you're not going to be generating your electricity anymore. So it doesn't need any fuel. So let's start with, well, could I power my entire house with solar panels? PV stands for photovoltaic. The answer is sure, you've got lots of money. But for most of us, I think the answer is no. I mean, if you took your electric bill and looked at how much electricity you use each month, and then figured out how big an array of solar panels you would have to have to provide that much, it would be big and it would cost a lot of money. And it would cost so much that it would probably take you 20 years or more in what you pay on your electric bill to pay for that. So I'm not going to talk from that aspect tonight that you're going to keep running your air conditioner and you're going to run your big flat screen TVs and you're going to run all the stuff you run today and you're going to do a solar. That's not going to happen. So okay then, from a preparedness viewpoint. I mean, what are the critical things? I'm talking about, let's say the power is going to be out for a month or six months or a year or more. What would you consider to be the most important things that don't consume a ton of electricity that you might like to power with solar? So I just put a few of my thoughts up here. You might have things of your own. But LED lights, they're really efficient. Don't take much power. We use little batteries for all kinds of things. But you can't have enough of those on the shelf to last forever. So you want some rechargeable small batteries for your flashlights and your radios and all that. And you'd like to be able to recharge those. Communications, ham radio, scanners, weather radios. Something you might consider doing is you could have the plumbing in your house piped up with a little 12 volt RV pump and you could collect rain water and pipe that into your house plumbing system and you could have a little battery-powered pump that would actually pressurize your copper lines in your house and you could turn on the faucet and flush the toilet. The more you've got a big enough tank full of water that you can collect it and store it. A grain mill, a little, I'm not talking big size by size, but maybe a little refrigerator or freezer. They make them in 12 volt power or you could use an AC power, a little chest freezer or something and run it from a battery to an inverter. I'll talk about that in a minute. A ceiling fan. Then that's, you know, if you were powering it directly 12 volts off of a battery. You could also run some of your normal 120 volt AC stuff in your house. If you're not using it all the time, there might be a few things that are really handy like some power tools. You're only going to use them for 15 minutes. Well, that's not a lot of electric. It sucks your battery down quickly, but if you're not running it 24 hours a day, you could do that. But don't consider an electric hot water heater, your air conditioner, the things that use those 40 and 15, 60 amp breakers down in your pan on the basement. Don't think about doing that with solar. So how does solar work? We call photovoltaic. Here's a little example. Each one of these is a little 15 watt panel. 15 watts ain't much, folks. And that's how big it takes to get it. So this is 45 watts all together. Sunshine's on this. It generates a voltage, goes into a little charge controller. That's what this guy is. And that's smart enough to get the optimum use out of this to charge your 12 volt battery. That's the part I'm showing up here at the top. You could cut this stuff off and just do that. In fact, that's what I do for my AM Radio Shack. Or you've got enough panel and enough battery. You could have what's called an inverter. And that battery through this inverter can change this into a 120 volt AC. That's what you're using. That's how it works. There's two different kinds of systems. One's called a grid-connected system. And one is a grid-independent system. This one is called grid-connected. And there's a lot of folks out there trying to sell this these days. And with all the government socialism rebates and credits that we all pay our taxes and our amour and bills, and then they take our money and they give it back to folks that want to put on solar panels. This is what they're selling. And they propose you put a bunch of panels on your roof. And then you connect that just through an inverter right into your electrical panel. And when the sun's up, the panels are generating. And whatever you're generating is that much less you have to buy from AMON. And if you have to be generating more than you're consuming right then, you basically send it back on the power line to AMON and they have to pay you for it. We don't pay as much as you pay them. But the problem with this system, it's really not good for us when you're thinking about this form of preparedness. Because if the grid goes down, now you're left with some solar panels and an inverter. And so you're only going to generate electricity when the sun's up. And what if you want to turn some lights on? It doesn't really work too well at night. And there's no place to store it if you don't have batteries. So this is not what you want to think of for personal preparedness. Now a grid independent system, it is not connected to your AMON panel as well. It could be but that would give you more expense. So that's basically what I got sitting on the table. This is a solar panel. It's a little charge controller. It's a deep cycle battery. And you can cut it off there. Forget about this. And just power 12 volt stuff. Radius, lights, things like that. And if you want, you can have an inverter so that you can run that circular saw once in a while or a meat grinder or whatever. So that's the difference between a grid independent and a grid dependent system. So I'd recommend grid independent. That's what's sitting on the table here. And it can get bigger and bigger. But this is just a little show and tell. Next. So the angle matters. The best thing is for this thing to point directly perpendicular to the sun. The sun should be shining right at it. Not at an angle this way. Not at an angle, you know, this way. But right at it. That's the best. You're going to get the most power out of it from it. Now, for that thing without you being there to move it around to track the sun as it moves across the sky and everything gets pretty complicated. So what most folks do is they just point the panel due south. So if south was that way, that's the way I would set this panel up. Now sun's going to come over there, come up in the east. It's going to track across the sky. It's going to set in the west. But when it's up the highest and doing the most good, it's going to be pointing pretty much at the panel. Pretty much perpendicular. Now the other thing that happens in that little diagram I'm trying to show you, as you know, in the wintertime the sun is much lower on the horizon. It comes up. Listen to me. You know what I'm talking about. It comes up low and it tracks lower across the horizon. And in the summertime, it comes up further north from east. It tracks way up high. It sets over there north of west. And the daylight hours are, you know, 15 hours long. And in the wintertime they're only 8 hours long or whatever. So there's a compromise for that. What you can do, and for St. Louis, is you can tilt this thing you can just go out there in August and tilt this thing to a certain position and then go back out in November and tilt it to a different position and leave it until February and March and then maybe in the summertime you'd take these legs off the back and you'd have it tilted pretty flat like that because in the summertime it's real high. So you don't have to go out there, let's see, four times a year. And that would make it collect a lot more solar. That happens to be the angle of the solar. If you built a little bracket that would hold this thing at 12 degrees, which is way down near flat, or at 36 degrees or at 64, which is about like this, three positions would cover you for the whole year and do a pretty good job. That's what this guy's done at the end of his house here. Got this panel hinged up at the top and he's got these telescoping legs and he's just showing you how it could be moved from here to here and sit there pretty sturdy. Okay, now I'm going to get into a little bit of math. I'll try to keep it simple and I don't want you to memorize any of this, but I'm just trying to make a few points. First of all, some electricity basics. DC means direct current. That's what you get out of a battery. A little diesel battery. It's got one and a half volts from one end to the other. A little nine volt batteries. We used to put in our transistor radio. It says nine volts. Our car battery has 12 volts, but it's all direct current. You connect something up to it and it's just going one way. Alternating current is what you have in your house and in this room and the voltage is just going up and down and the current is going this way and this way and this way and this way 60 times a second. So there are two different things. You can't hook batteries up to something that's AC and expect it to work and you can't hook AC up to your flashlight battery or whatever. I mentioned earlier an inverter. That's a box that basically can convert DC. It can take 12 volt DC off that car battery and generate 120 volts AC which you can power up. Velocity and fan or whatever. So that's the thing you plug in your car or your lighter to plug stuff into? Yes. Yep, exactly. That's an inverter. And they come in little, big and bigger. That's an inverter. Lots of RVs have them. Okay, now the math part. Electricity. Volts times amps equals watts. So I got 12 volt battery and I hooked something up to it and there's two amps floating in the wires. 12 times 2 is 24. That's 24 watts. That's how much power the thing is consuming. Same thing on 120 volt. It can be AC and it still volts times amps is watts. So 120 volts plugged in the wall if you're sucking two amps down the same wire now you can talk about 240 watts. So 24 watts. And then if you know what a kilogram or a kilometer or kilometer means that just means a thousand. So a thousand watts is one kilowatt or a kilowatt. And then if you have something that's using one kilowatt of power and you run that thing for two hours it's going to consume two kilowatt hours of electricity. So it's using 10 kilowatts and you run it for half an hour it's going to use five kilowatt hours. Does that make sense? So that's what you're buying from Amherst kilowatt hours. Yeah Jeff. When you buy a battery like a deep cycle they talk about amp hours. Do you expand on that? How that will be? Yeah if you can hang on just a minute I'm going to talk about that at the end when I get all the batteries but that's a great question and it's well I'll answer it real quick if it's a 12 volt battery and it's got 100 amp hours of capacity amps times volts 100 times 12 volts is 1200 amps times volts which is watts. Watt hours. So I'll get to it in a minute. You just take the amps times the 12 volts and that gives you the watt and get there. Okay sorry for the wars I threw this together yesterday and you got two verbose. So let's take this pretend this panel is 100 watts it's not it's only 45 but let's say okay how many kilowatt hours can I get out of this panel in a day or a month or a year because that's what I know I'm buying from Amherst. So on average the sun comes up and tracks all the way across here and you get the equivalent of about three hours worth all the way through the days of the year. Three hours a day of its peak output when the sun first comes up it's not going to generate 100 watts because it's coming at such an angle when it gets up in the middle of the day it is and at the end of the day it's not generating much anymore even though you had a 12 hours worth of daylight you didn't get 12 hours worth of its peak rated output. So let's say this is a 100 watt panel times three 100 watts would give us 300 watt hours 100 watt panel divide by a thousand and you get it's 0.1 kilowatts and that 0.1 kilowatt panel which is 100 watts gets about three hours worth of that full output a day and you get 0.3 kilowatt hours per day. That ain't much folks. We don't do this to save money we do this to save lives and I spoke out it might take 20 years to pay back 100 watt panel and a little controller like that might cost about 200 bucks and it's going to generate about 3 cents a day worth of electricity or about 10 dollars a year or 20 years you buy that thing and you think you're going to save money because you're not going to buy electricity from Amher you're fooling yourself you're not it's going to take you 20 years to get your initial investment back and that's not why we do it we do it because we might have a little bit of electricity there when things go bad so if that 100 watt panel generated 0.3 kilowatt hours per day which ain't much what could I power with that so 0.3 kilowatt hours if you want to convert it back to watts multiply times a thousand and you get 300 watt hours so what that means is I could power a 300 watt widget for one hour and this would have generated enough power or I could power a smaller 100 watt widget 100 watt light bulb and hold it in a condescal for 30 hours or a 60 watt device for 5 hours do you see the math there it's just the watts that's being used times how many hours it's being used that's the watt hours so you know a 100 watt panel which is going to be about twice the size of this not quite would power a 100 watt light bulb for 30 hours and then the next day you'd have to charge up your battery again that ain't much LEDs are a lot better a 12 and a half watt LED would probably look like a 600 watt bulb still ain't much but that's how you do the math or we could turn this all around the other way and say what is it that I want to power and how big a panel would take to generate enough juice day after day after day to do that so let's turn it around lots of numbers but hang in there with me this is just an example I made of let's add up what we want to power let's say alright I've got a ham radio I'm going to run that thing 3 hours a day where it's just receiving and listening if you look up in the front of your ham radio it says your radio takes 0.65 amps when it's just receiving and it takes 12 volt battery and I want to run it for 3 hours do you know math you get 3 watt hours now I want to key the mic and transmit talk now the radio takes more power now it takes 10 amps instead of 0.65 amps do the math 1 hours worth of talking on that thing use a lot more juice how about we want to run a few little LED lights at 9 watts a piece for 2 hours in the evening there's the number how about a grain mill how about some miscellaneous power tools but you're only going to run that circular saw for a little bit when you cut through the board this is all made up but let's add that up 297 watt hours that just my coincidence happens to be for example 100 watt panel if I had a 100 watt panel and that battery sitting there I could run all that stuff that many hours a day come out about even so it's practical to generate a lot of power but it might be a few things that are really important like a little bit of LED lights a ham radio some power tools I think that's the end of my math would I ask for math? yeah here's the battery thing we talked about the solar panel that was all about how many watts does this generate and how many watt hours a kilowatt hour will generate you're basically putting that energy into the battery think about it this way this battery is a 5 gallon bucket of water this thing is producing a little trickle of water when the sun's up it's pouring a little bit of water into that bucket now when you're going to use that power to turn on lights or radio or power saw you're going to take water out of that bucket you turn on one little LED light this is going to trickle a little bit of water out of the bucket when you pull the on switch on your circular saw it's going to run a lot of water out of the bucket but you're going to let go of the switch on the saw so you're not going to run the thing for 24 hours that's kind of what's going on here this thing is trickling a little bit of electricity into the battery whenever the sun's up and then you're going to take it out either a little at a time with whatever you're using so then how big of a battery do I need to store that stuff that's what I'm talking about here but Jeff asked the perfect question they're rated in amp hours not watt hours to make it nice and confusing for us this is a bill of trolling motor battery in this box I bought a Walmart for about 80 bucks it's rated at 100 amp hours of capacity well if you take the amp hours times 12 volts amps times volts is watts so you get watt hours now if you want that battery to last a long time you don't want to take it all the way down to zero every day and charge it back up you'll wear out that battery once or less so they recommend you only use about 25% of its charge before you recycle it again and then it'll last 5-10 years so here's our example a 100 amp hour battery 100 amp hours times 12 volts is 1200 watt hours of storage but we only use about a quarter of that so that we don't kill our battery we want to drain the fuel tank from full down to three quarters and then fill the tank again I'm about to lose my battery so it's time to shut up perfect so for 25% of that it says I should only drain 300 watt hours out of this battery every day and then put that 300 watt hours back in there well that just had to work out just about right with a 100 watt solar panel so nice round numbers if you can't remember anything else I said we had a 100 watt panel and a 100 amp hour trolling battery you could power some of that stuff I talked about ham radios and lights it won't hurt too so they would not use the battery no good question I'm going to use some of it will this thing overcharge it and the answer is no that's what this little charge controller does when this thing is all the way peaked up it will quit charging it so it doesn't overcharge it and cook the fluid out of the battery and all of that last slide I had a few more but I forgot to write them down some useful websites there's a place down I think around spring field or Joplin they got a kit on there with a 100 watt panel and a charge controller and stuff for about $200 that's pretty cheap and I think the panels themselves if you wanted to buy two or three they're only about 100 bucks for a 100 watt panel I mentioned little charging up little batteries this is a little battery charger for D's, C cells AA's, AAA's and 9 volts you can charge it any and all let me put four in here at a time and this thing has a little cigarette plug adapter on it so you could power that up with your 12 volt battery here into here and now you can charge any kind of little little big batteries pretty handy those are simply just for the rechargeable batteries themselves yes you can't put a Dura cell in here it wouldn't work I don't know what I'm doing I have both kinds of battery chargers I have one that I have one that you can do Dura cells and one that you buy the rechargeable one really I didn't know you can even recharge the Dura cells it's not very efficient it's not these little guys, I use them all the time in my LED flashlights and everything else by the time you buy about two or three Dura cell batteries you've paid for the rechargeable battery a hundred times do you run them completely down I try not to just like they said on these it's better if you don't run them all the way down yeah Jeff if my LED when I'm just listening probably one amp I got a hundred amp battery does that mean I've got a hundred hours in the area exactly that's what it means and then you would have run your battery all the way down yep but if you said I don't want to run the fuel tank down to three quarters you got a 25 you can run that thing all day and you only drain 24 hours with one amp and then you ought to recharge the battery well the system is going to charge you didn't mention in one thing not to take over John but that little unit between the battery make sure that your battery doesn't on a cloudy day discharge back out through your panels because it's got diodes in it and diodes only let current flow on the way so it's really important so overnight this won't try to discharge your battery or on a cloudy day your battery will start to discharge so that's why you need that thing in the middle to keep your batteries and discharging through your panels so this little website here is where it's only about 30 bucks nowadays and it comes with an AC plug so now when it's available you can charge your batteries out of the wall and a cigarette plug 12-volt DC so you can charge it off your car or this battery or whatever very handy for about 30 bucks and then go buy you some rechargeable batteries for your stuff that's a good thing to invest in this is a little bitty solar panel got a bunch of little adapters in here but it's got a fitting on it that'll charge my cell phone I can lay this on the dash of the car and it's got an oversized battery in here for a cell phone this little guy charges this battery and then I can plug this into my cell phone pretty cool so where did you find that? I knew somebody would ask that hell I don't remember we got one my parents gave all of us for Christmas one year they gave up all the kids so that if something happens maybe as long as the you know the as long as there's service we can still talk if the grid power goes away probably cell phones are gonna go away if it's long term at least you can see what your point is this is another little toy this is a little light stick I think they're intended for NRVs but these are little LEDs on here and this thing is amazingly bright let's try to show you here if you turn the lights off in a room you can work at a desk easily with this and I think it's about one and a half watts or something like that and they got little plugs on them you can strain them end to end and you can light up something put it over your kitchen sink one last point you can certainly run more than one battery in parallel in your storage capacity absolutely something like 234 in parallel and you can have three, four, five hundred amperes or whatever you're right you just got a bigger gas tank you don't have to fill it up as well all the stuff still uses gas at the same rate or uses electric at the same rate but if you have five of these batteries all in parallel you'd have five times as big of a gas tank it might be nice to get through some cloudy days in the wintertime because there's some times when we don't get a lot of sun or you could run theory and put more things but if you're not putting as much gas in the tank that you're using eventually that tank's going to go dry and the batteries will go dead so you have to have enough solar panel to keep pouring water in the bucket or gas do you think that's outside of your round yep does that charger tell you when you're about 25% down under charge I mean no when you're almost out it's got a little digital display which you can turn off so you don't waste power and it says 12.9 volts or a little chart I wish I had anything written but if you're I think a 12 volt battery full charge is 12.6 or 12.7 oh it was 13 13.3 it's over 30 it's not that high that's what this thing will try to keep charging at that point and this will display 13. something but as soon as you disconnect it and put a little load on it it'll pretty quickly go down about 12.6 or 12.7 and that's basically 100% and then to answer your question that little chart says okay at 12.7 volts it's let's say 90% charging at 12.6 volts it's 80% charge and when you get down to about 12.2 or 3 you're getting kind of low so that's kind of your gas gauge that voltage readout along with the little chart will tell you how far down your battery is getting is this the harbor freight this is the little harbor freight 139 bucks when you catch it on sale 45 watts that and a battery this comes with it the battery does not come with it I'm sorry it's just the solar panel the charge controller and a couple of little light bulbs for 130 converter come together I just built a PVC stand that came with it too and that's got a couple different angles you can set it up just by moving the screw it's pretty handy these are kind of mounted on a little they're older ones this is like a molded thing around it outside to kind of protect this glass panel and it can take some pretty decent size hail that's covered glass panel this is glass it's covered oh no, the glass is right there it's just covered around the edges so you leave the whole everything out year round do you cover the converter of the battery put that in your house long wire that makes more sense yeah drill the hole in the wall or something around the wire from outside into your house you want this to face due south depending on how your house is maybe you've got to put it on the roof to avoid some trees from shading it maybe you're lucky enough you can set it out on your back patio that faces south and you can just have it right on the ground let's see if this is a degradation I think they say they're supposed to put out 80% of the rated wattage after 20 years so they last a long time they'll last a long time so did you get the battery from Harbor Freight 2? I bought the battery a Walmart I bought the little case you don't need that case this thing by the way has a little button on top you can push and see a green light or a red light or tells you how charged it is but you can just set the battery there 12 volt battery get a 12 volt deep cycle battery don't get the battery that you used to start your car get the one that the fishermen used to power their trolling motors a marine battery they're designed to get sucked way down and recharged your car starting battery you don't take much juice out of it every time you start your car can you upgrade that meaning could you add another panel or two they even got some slick little plugs you could put three of these side by side by side and plug them together daisy chain where did you find the case for your battery? he could find them anywhere on loan I think I might have bought that from Sportsman's Guide which is a little catalog I get in the mail hey John how did that protect the I mean that's good for getting electric but what happens if there's an EMP did that go get fried in your out before you even put them even if you got in the shed in the box if you got in the shed in the mail box and all sealed up I'd say the chances are damn slim it's going to be damaged I actually believe everything I've read this thing will probably survive an EMP what really gets stuff is a long long wire like air and UEs electric wires that are on the poles out there that's a huge antenna and when you get an EMP it sends a huge voltage surge down the line and it'll fry anything you've got plugged in in your house but if you've got 20 feet of wire going from here to here I don't think that's that big of an antenna and I think there's no guarantee I'm leaving mine out all the time I'm not packing away for when things go bad I'm using it so you're saying normally you think if it's in a box just a regular box in a shed or something it wouldn't get hurt what works really good for EMP protection is a galvanized trash can believe it or not and then if you bought some metal tape and sealed a lid it'll be even better there's some YouTube videos on it so if you really want to protect something from an EMP you can't use it when it's in the can where you ought to store it but can it touch the inside of the can or just be a space between probably the space it has to be insulated best if you have some foam pads or some bubble wrap works really good wrap that stuff in that so it's not touching the metal can