Anybody using battery storage?

[dolooper]

I'm curious about your experience. I'm investing to make a little bit of electricity available with batteries. Enough to for a few nights of pretty low demand like some lights, radio, small TV.

I already have a couple of 12 volt deep cell batteries for the boat. I'm thinking about adding another one or two. I figure my generator when it gets here will have enough excess capacity to charge after running essentials and could probably add small solar panel(s) later. I picked up a 400 watt inverter, so you know I'm starting off real small here. I calculate that would give each battery about 5 hours at a 100 watts after counting in efficiency loss and only discharging the battery to 50%. That'd let me have some juice at night without having to annoy the neighbors with a generator as well as something quick to set up for short-term blackouts.

Any thoughts? Advice?

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[dirtbag]

i have been looking at magnetic motors on youtube , very impresive no fuel aternative that is cheep to build and easy to hook to most any genarator package .

 

[Nwcid]

I have 4 Trojan T-105 RE batteries in my enclosed trailer using solar to charge them. I went with these batteries because they were the same price as the deep cycle batteries I was looking at. Benefit of ~45ah extra reserve and they are designed to be discharged and recharged at fluxuating levels vs RV/marine which should be fully charged each time to get best life out of them.

If you plan on recharging your batteries off the generator do it using a battery charger vs the generator since most only put out about 8 amps taking a LONG time to charge.

For me in the summer I was able to run 6-8 amp continuous draw 24/7 using my solar/ 2 batteries. I have a 200 watt solar set up on my trailer. Then we went on a fire where there was a heavy inversion most of the day and we were getting very little direct sunlight. While it was charging up during the day it was not like it had been. After about day 3 of this my batteries were at 12v in the morning when I was waking up, which is when I added the second set. Now at bed time I had 12.5-12.6v and in the morning I was getting up with 12.3v

This set up allows me to run either the fans or the heater, charge my laptop, have some lights on, have the radio on and misc things. I have a 1000w inverter in my trailer so the plan for me is if I have any power outages this winter just run a power cord in from it.