It has been an interesting fortnight, to say the least, since I was last able to write. And, indeed, a cold one.
The coal & rail strikes were quite aggressively put down, by all accounts - news has been sketchy. What has been made clear is that the military was brought in both to arrest strikers, and to get coal through. There has been talk of treason charges being brought against a lot of the strikers, and unfortunately quite a few people seem to be accepting of certain liberties being taken taking away liberties. In other words, governments are getting their way attempting to intimidate and harrass, and most people are happy to let them.
It is a simple fact - people like comfort. They get annoyed when they are subject to brown-outs, black-outs, limited access to television.
At work, we seemed to have quite an interest going on solar panels. Of course, with limited access to money, internet, and so on, delivery and supply has been limited - without even considering the rush on them. Now that the lights stay on, we are starting to get phone calls cancelling orders... Not the best situation for a business - much money tied up with expensive products.
The other problem we have had is disabusing customers of the ideas of exactly how much power a solar panel can deliver... Some mathematics...
An 80 Watt, unregulated solar panel is able to deliver roughly 5 Amps at 16 Volts (80 W = 5A * 16V). If the solar panel is regulated down to 12 Volts, this can easily drop the delivered power down to 60 Watts (60 W = 5A * 12V).
Watts and Amps are what are happening that second, not a measure of total over the course of time... An 80 Watt panel will, in 1 hour, produce 80 Watt-Hours (80 WHr = 80W * 1Hr). When regulated, this can easily come down to be 60WHr.
Say the sun shines (depending on your location, time of year, weather, cloud cover) 6 to 8 hours per day. This means that the panel will produce 240 - 320 Watt Hours per Day.
Small fridges run at 12 Volts using 4 Amps for 24 Hours per day. This means that the fridge requires 12*4*24 = 1,152 Watt Hours per Day, which is roughly four times what the panel can produce. Of course, this assumes a few things - most fridges will only run at that level when they need to cool down, which won't be too often if they are well insulated and not opened much.
So, in order to keep your batteries charged, and fridge operating, indefinitely, you need to put into the batteries at least as much energy as you take out - so you'll need a few panels - easily up to four 80W panels.
Which means quite an outlay... the best part of $2,000. Something that people rail against... Most people will accept the numbers, when you lay it out for them, a few get aggressive. And a very few will tell you how a friend of theirs is very close to making a perpetual motion machine (rather an over-unity device) work - in complete contradiction to the known (and well established) laws of physics.