Solar Dorm by Ross
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 10. 7.05
No doubt the first thing you thought about, when getting to college, was how to harness the sun to charge your Powerbook, external monitor and mobile phone, right? No. Well, maybe you weren’t Ross Nizle. By his own admission, an “avid reader of Treehugger” Ross wanted to get his teeth stuck into some alternative energy. Not being able to modify his dorm building, nor having access to the roof, he had to devise a clever solution. A weekend’s work later and he had it. Voilà! -- a balcony-boosted power plant, right out of his own room. Ross has kindly provided us with details of his website, so we can share all the specs, and heaps of pics, with intrigued treehuggers. If Ross keeps up this good form we optimistically expect he'll soon be harvesting rainwater and composting on that balcony too. :-) Bravo Ross, just don’t forget to attend lectures! ::Solar Dorm
Not sure what the "charge controller" cost, but my system only required a $2.00 rectifier to prevent battery current from reverse flowing through the panel an night. Nor is the voltmeter a necessity. A portable multimeter that you can use for many other electrical projeccts can be touched to the poles if you happen to need a readout for reasurrance;...but I have not measured my battery charge level for almost ten years and the output is fine. THe only maintenance issue that crops up is that about once a year the battery connections need to be taken apart and the oxide layer scruffed off. If you don't do this the time to charge and recharge increases noticeably.
This looks like an excellent way to lure liberal minded coeds to ones dorm. It's much better for the environment than impressing them with a fancy car.
Very cool, Ross! Awesome project!
I have emailed SundanceSolar, but does anyone happen to know if this kit comes with the fuse? I'm sure its pretty cheap but it's the only item not listed in the "this kit comes with...". This is very cool, I'm already trying to spec a place to mount it.
So let me get this straight. The guy spends $295 plus shipping for a solar panel and parts. All of this to generate 20 watts of power. He could have bought electricity from the power grid for $0.10 per Kilowatt. This project has a payout of 16.8 years. And that assumes he was charging his iPod, laptop, and monitor the entire time. I have much better uses of $300 than building a project like this.
Randy Best,
Our electricity is cheap because it fails to include the hidden costs, such as dependence on foreign oil (over $200 billion spent in Iraq, check), pollution and it's environmental degradation, consequences such as global warming (cost of more severe and frequent hurricanes such as Katrina, another $200 billion), as well as the health effects from air pollution (living in LA == smoking 2 packs a day, cost of chemotherapy, $20,000++)... Need I go on?
This is really sweet, it's got me checking out how many panels/batteries I would need to power my desktop, monitor, laptop, iPod, cellphone, etc. So far I'm at 30 cells with 20 batteries, don't think this is gonna work.
Btw, I think the purpose of this is not for the electricity to be cheaper than off the grid, the whole idea is to be more enviromentally friendly while minding a decent budget.
MWD - Are you dumb? I'm sick of DUMB environmentalist...it's not that I think the environment isn't important, it's your lack of historical context that flaw's your opinions.
We've been accurately measuring the weather for less than 100 years! How old is the earth? And what is that in percentage of time we have data for? .000001% (less actually).
So a big hurricanes hit the coast, it's happened before and with as much frequency...but perhaps before our time and also before the industrial revolution.
Where I'm from, environmentalist don't want us to drive on the beach (because it causes erosion). They (of course) have no idea what a 27 foot wave does to the sand dunes during a nor’easter. I would have to drive rally style up and down the beach for a year to do as much damage as one wave!
So, let's stop kidding ourselves...most environmentalists have GOD complexes and think that humans control the earth, when in fact we don't...it dictates to us.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm sick of the save the planet BS. There was once an ice age, we didn't cause it, and we didn't fix it. Perhaps the planet is in a warming cycle that lasts millions of years before it goes into another cooling cycle toward yet another ice age. Don't you people get it...the difference between interpolation and extrapolation!
So ... let's do nothing then. No, Excellent.
Much environmental rhetoric is BS. But there's no argument that since the beginning of the industrial Revolution, we've radically changed the particulate amounts in the atmosphere. Yes, there may have been ice ages before, but there wasn't, as far as I'm aware, a previous Industrial Revolution mucking about. Right?
Also, although there are doubts about global warming creating more frequent hurricanes, the simple physical mechanics of hurricanes show that they increase in severity when they form and pass over warmer water -- and water temperatures are definitely rising.
Environmentalists, good ones, anyway, don't think humans "control the earth", but they do, quite reasonably and with considerable research backing them, believe we interact with the earth and affect in it non-negligible ways. The other argument is nice bit of faux modesty helping to sell a very pretty straw man.
I'm very sorry the big mean treehuggers took away your ability to drive on your favorite beach. But science is science.
We're with ian. So sea levels rise 30 feet in the next 50-100 years, killing billions. It's natural! As long as it's not definitively the fault of people, who cares? Bleeding heart environmentalists always whining about "we want arable land" and "we want drinkable water" and "we want a place to live" -- get over it! Buy another SUV, fill your gas tank, stock up at Costco, and hang out for a few million years until things cool down again...
Don't you people get it...politics is more important than humanity!