₦airaland Forum

SycophanticGoat:
Yes.. So now I believe you can do the calculations yourself right?

SycophanticGoat:
That is why you have to be very conservative in this area and also be careful during usage otherwise, if you wanna capture all you want to use, you may break the bank for solar power. The fact is, you can't run your TV for 24hours, many people don't watch TV for more than 4-6h a day, you can't run your bulb from night till morning and morning till night. You may only use it for say 4-5 hours 7 - 11pm. You may only use your laptop for about 4h a night, except you're a work at home person. Etc.. When you check the real time you may spend in conservative usage of your appliances, then we can recalculate your solar power requirements...

SycophanticGoat:
LoL.. Lemme help you out in a more conservative manner.. You can only address this as if tho, you're preparing for the night. Reason is, your batteries gets charged mostly during the day and even when you use power then, the panels may be sufficient to charge your batteries and still deliver your current for your load. So I will say about 15 hours is perfect for this analysis.

Multiplying the time by power, we get 1,000W * 15hours = 15,000Wh
Assuming you'll probably be having only small amounts of sunshine daily, then we can divide by 4h pa day. However, in hotter/very sunny regions, we will divide the value by 6h. So let us use 5hours: 15,000Wh ÷ 5h = 3,000W of panels (3000W is such a huge number and you'd need at least, 12-14 of 300W to give you something close to that value if you'all be using a PMW controller although not advisable to use PMW with such array) . So the idea here is, the more then number of hours you expect to use your system pa day, the higher the wattage of your solar array.

If I were to carry out this analysis for a client, I'd def use 12 hours maximum, for my analysis instead of 24hours.

For batteries..
Since our total watt-hour is 15,000Wh, we'll have to divide this value with the voltage of the entire system. If you'll go with a 24V system, then 15,000Wh ÷ 24V = 625Ah. Now to ensure your battery bank last long in service, we multiply this value by 2 (this prevents usage beyond 50%). Hence, 625 × 2 = 1,250Ah. Let's just take it to the nearest 200. So we have 1,400Ah.

Mind you, batteries are usually rated as 12V so a parallel connection will give you 24V. Therefore, you need 14 of 200Ah batteries connected in series and parallel to give you 1,400Ah.

SycophanticGoat:
That will then depend on the number of hours you will like to power each of your appliances pa day. State the number of hours and I will go further with my calculations..

SycophanticGoat:
For the items listed, even 1.5Kva will do the trick but I will always advice people to go for higher inverters in case they'd wanna increase load in the future. Your TV should not be more than 350w, if the bulbs are energy efficient then let's peg their total wattage at 40w (some bulbs are as low as 3w), laptops usually are rated about 50-70w. Let me peg yours at 70 each, means total will be 140w for two laptops. Modern fridge should not be more than 300-400w. Total power rating is about 940w, let's say, max of 1,000W (1KW). Dividing this value by 0.8 will convert the Wattage to Va. This equals to 1,250Va (1.25KVa). Adding 20% for surge, we will have 1,500Va (1.5KVa)

In terms of battery capacity needed, will get back to you..

For cost..

Batteries cost between 70something to 100K for Indian products but will cost higher for American brands.
Inverter (2.5KVa) will cost about 60 - 90K

DMerciful:
Alternative power sources like inverter/batteries and solar are for powering light load esp for convenience. They cannot economically replace public power supply when the load becomes large. For 3 bedroom flats , 5 energy bulbs is enuf at any particular time, 1 freezer is enuf to run for 5hours per day, 1 led TV and prob 2 rechargeable fans(they are more energy efficient). A 300w* 4 solar panels, 40a epsolar charge controller, 1.5kva sulkam inverter, 4*200AH batteries and you're good. If you need specifics...hala me

GenBuhari:
From Washington post, guess they are a tad anti-Venezuela. Though things are tough I think US publications are prone to exaggerating the negatives - they do the same when writing about Nigeria

It's come to this: The country with the largest oil reserves in the world can't afford to brew its own beer, stay in its own time
zone, or even have its own people show up to work more than two times a week.

Venezuela, in other words, is well past the point of worrying that its economy might collapse. It already has. That's the only way
to describe an economy that the International Monetary Fund thinks is going to shrink 8 percent and have 720
percent inflation this year. And that's not even the worst of it. No, that's the fact that the state itself is near collapse. Venezuela
already has the world's second­highest murder rate, and now the Chavista regime seems to be threatening violence of its own if
the opposition succeeds in recalling President Nicolás Maduro. It's a grim race between anarchy and civil war.
This is an entirely man­made catastrophe. Venezuela, by all rights, should be rich. As we just said, it has more oil than the
United States or Saudi Arabia or anyone else for that matter. But despite that, economic mismanagement on a world­historical
scale has barely left it with enough money to even, well, pay for printing money anymore. That's right: Venezuela is almost too
poor to afford inflation. Which is just another way of saying that the government is all but bankrupt.

How did Venezuela get here? Well, by spending more than it had and not having as much as it should. Let's take these in
reverse order. It really shouldn't have been hard for the government to use some of its petrodollars on the poor without
destroying the economy. Every other oil­rich country, after all, has figured that out. But you can't redistribute oil profits if
there aren't oil profits to redistribute, or at least not many of them. And there weren't after Hugo Chavez replaced people who
knew what they were doing with people he knew would be loyal to him at the state­owned oil company. It didn't help that he
scared foreign oil companies off too. Or that he took money out, but didn't put it back in, so that they can no longer turn as
much of their extra­heavy crude into refined oil. Add it all up, and Venezuela's oil production actually fell by about 25 percent
between 1999 and 2013.

But that didn't stop the government from going on a spending spree. How big of one? Well, even triple­digit oil prices weren't
enough to balance its books. So it got money from the one place it could: the printing press. And it has had to get a lot more
now that oil prices have fallen so far the past two years. The result, as you might expect, of printing all these bolivars is that the
bolivar has lost almost all its value against the dollar — and no, that's not hyperbole. Since the start of 2012, the bolivar has,
according to black market rates, fallen 99.1 percent against the dollar.

But rather than face this reality Venezuela has opted for a game of economic whac­a­mole. It has tried to legislate inflation
away by telling businesses what prices they're allowed to sell at, and even tried to wish it away by saying it "does not exist." All
that has done, though, is make it harder for businesses to sell things at a profitable price — which means they haven't sold
things at all. So the government has tried to fix this by doling out dollars to select companies on better terms than anyone else
can get them. The idea is that giving them money will let them keep making money — and, as a result, filling their stores —
when they sell at the prices they're supposed to. But the problem with this is while it's not profitable for unsubsidized
companies to stock their shelves, it's not profitable enough for subsidized ones to do so either when they can just sell their
dollars in the black market for more than they can resell imported goods.
The upshot is that stores go empty, prices go up, and lines last for hours — although, in typical fashion, the government has
tried to, I guess, solve this by forcing people out of them.

This is only getting worse now that the oil­dependent government is running out of dollars itself. Indeed, the country's biggest
brewer just announced that it's shutting down all its factories since it hasn't gotten the dollars it needs to import ingredients.
The same has happened with toilet paper, and almost with their money. Venezuela, you see, doesn't have its own printing
presses, but rather pays foreign companies to print their money for them. That means it needs dollars just to be able to create
bolivars.

But this isn't just a story about bad ideas ruining an economy. It's also a story about bad planning. Venezuela's government has
never come up with a backup system for its main hydroelectric generator, so the country doesn't have enough power now that a
drought has brought water levels down to historic lows. Maduro has done everything from rationing power to malls to moving
the clocks forward half an hour — so people won't need lights as much at night — to telling the 30 percent of the country that
works for the government to only come in on Mondays and Tuesdays.
It's a lot easier to come up with a list of things that aren't failing. That's nothing. Venezuela's economy is collapsing, its currency
is too, its stores have nothing in them, and it can't keep the lights on or its people safe. The only things the Chavistas are good
at is creating scapegoats, creating lines, and creating misery.

Call it Maduro's law: Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong when your government makes it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/04/venezuela-is-becoming-a-failed-state/

nextstep:
Frankly, I think you'll not save as much as you think, once all the little details are added up. You'll need to pay for:

- 10 solar panels for a 2.5kW system
- 4 200Ah batteries (note you can only use 1/2 battery capacity if you want them to reach 3 years)
- 2 inverters (yes, two, don't skimp here)
- thick cables (I forget the gauge, but it's much larger than regular 2.5mm), and this gets expensive per meter
- TY branch connectors
- aluminum channel rods
- tons of aluminum holders, bolts, nuts, washers
- transport, especially if you're outside Lagos, like me
- labour
- many other little bits and pieces that you'll have to waste time and money looking for, one at a time

Their price includes all the above, plus the assurance that they will provide all you need. I could have learned and got all these parts myself (after all I am an electrical engineer), but since this is not my domain, I paid (extra?) for the domain expertise and peace of mind. I was working on an already complex project, and didn't want to take more risk by buying all these pieces separately (which ironically can end up costing more)

For instance, I just took a cursory look at konga, and I found several systems described variously as 2.5kv, 1kv, etc… with inadequate number of panels. Two 250W panels is just 500W. How does that translate to 2.5kV? It's that kind of misinformation that can be quite dangerous if this is your first time. A lot of them use the much cheaper PWM chargers, when you really want the more efficient MPPT types. There's debate for which is better for Nigeria's hot weather, and some people even advocate spending more money on more panels than on a better charger, but YMMV. One such advertised system costs about #500k, but I imagine your final cost after all is said and done will be more like #800k.

Why don't you get a system from konga, try it out, and document it here?

nextstep:
The short answer is that you should just budget #2.5M for a system that will last through the night.

The long answer is that there are a lot of variables in your cost request:
- do you want to be able to run (for example) for 3 days continuously? or just a few hours per day of charge
- are you supplementing NEPA, gen, or will this be totally off grid?
- will you be satisfied with increasing capacity over time, or you want full capacity today?

I've already mentioned two places you can get started with Solar systems in Naija, so you can check them out… Solynta for instance, gives you a good sense of how much will buy a system close to your needs.

FowlYansh:
.The money used for this brigandash can renovate that primary school in Bayelsa State where children go to school in the afternoon because of lack of space to contain all of them at once

Nigeria what did we do to deserve this curse of a dullard who promised us CHANGE?

2019 GEJ will be back to save Nigeria.

ndcide:
Missed that dude.