After a house fire last June we chose to shelter in place, moving into an insulated ice-cream truck semi box that we had been setting up as a woodworking shop. Since we're off-grid it got pretty interesting! We had simple systems in place that really bailed us out.
The dates on the pictures are not right. These were taken shortly after the fire as we were getting ourselves collected. We shared our experiences at the time, this is taken from those notes.
Here's my off-grid, go-anyplace-internet setup:
A small 15 watt solar panel, it puts out 5amps of electricity in sunshine - note we don't have sunshine today...
Red = positive/+, connect the positive cable from the solar panel to the positive cable (the bigger alligator clamps in the photo below) on the positive battery terminal, black = negative/-, connect the negative cable from the solar panel to the negative cable on the battery. This setup runs our RV water pump, pulling water out of a plastic barrel to the faucet on our redneck yard-sink and has plenty left over for our laptop usage.
We generally disconnect anything not in use to save ghost draws so the water isn't hooked up, it uses the same size alligator clips as the battery to 12volt socket my computer charger is plugged in to, the smaller ones shown in the photo below but runs direct off the battery without a socket required.
The charging cable is on the right, plugged into the laptop in the photo below. The internet hotspot is plugged into a USB port on the computer so I don't need a 12volt splitter, (one plugs in, two plugs come out the other end, just like a 110 power strip gives you extra outlets), or an additional clamp to battery socket to power internet.
Brian ordered a 12volt power supply for my laptop, fixed me up with the battery to 12volt socket connector and also a 110 power supply. Nice to be able to use whatever is available without an inverter hogging power.
This little setup keeps the battery over 12 volts with the use we're giving it, even with rainy days, but the panel doesn't have enough juice to cook the battery if we don't use it. Simple, elegant, inexpensive. Brian's specialty.
A word about the battery business for those who might be interested. "Deep cycle" batteries are meant for heavier use than your car battery, though that will work in a pinch. Ours are rated for 400 "deep cycles" which means we can fully charge them and draw from them until they are bottomed out 400 times - in theory;)
They will last just over a year if we use them to their full potential. We've always closely monitored our batteries, checking charge at least daily, fluid levels and specific gravity at regular intervals to see if they'd like a drink of water or acid. The "deep cycle" batteries will last a very long time if we use them in our normal manner without bottoming them out on discharge.
Look in your common old flashlight. The pointed end of a (usually) C or D cell battery touches the flat end of another. The pointed end is the + terminal, the flat end is the -. Putting the + on the - means each 1.5 volt battery adds to the next, they are connected in series. If your flashlight has two batteries it's running on 3 volts.
If instead we connect the + ends of our two batteries together, and the - ends of our batteries together, we only have 1.5 volts - but we've got TWICE the capacity / run time. This is how Brian connected our deep cycle batteries. It will provide power for a longer time and also help us suck up available solar energy, it's easier to cram electricity into a bigger storage area.
There's a simple article with tips if you want to experiment at home, here:
http://www.zbattery.com/Connecting-B...es-or-Parallel
We are asked lots of questions about off-grid living and how we do simple things. We do like to set up small, sustainable power systems like this one. Best of all, it's portable!
We did get good batteries on the laptop setup after a week or so, had to check my pictures and notes, I couldn't remember.
We found the batteries on sale at Wal-Mart and here's the very first arrangement we set up after our house fire.
Since we HAD a pile of Harbor Freight solar panels that came with mounts we used those. It was fast and that was what mattered at the time. These came with charge control units and that was helpful. Yes, we disconnected them at night. We use a charge-controller on the 180 watt panels on our home that feed a large bulldog forklift battery and we disconnect that at night too.
You can see the panels on the semi-truck box here, we decided to set them at different angles to the sun instead of trying to turn them to track. We had plenty to do already
Hope this is helpful info. I'll post more as I can.
Thanks for having me here!