I've been Solar Struck by the SolarStik

[AmyJohnson]

well, I have to throw in our observstions. Doing rudimentary math, it seems as though we have been hovering around 70-80 per day ourselves. When we use the boat, we use quite a bit of power. Typically at the end of the day the solarboost registers about 12.8 volts for battery voltage and the "float" indication is intermittently on from night to night. But by morning, we are at about 12.2 or so. We tend to sleep with the fridge, anchor light, strereo, and all of our electronics operating. Usually by about 8:00 on a clear morning we can see about 5.5 amps on the solarboost display, which then jumps up to over 7 by about 9:00 Still not sure I understand all of that HS, but so far so good on this end as far as power goes. We are certainly not lacking for it at this point.

Thanks again. It has been fun and informative.

So, where do we go from here?

[hellosailor]

Amy-
"But by morning, we are at about 12.2 or so. Usually by about 8:00 on a clear morning we can see about 5.5 amps on the solarboost display, "
So, for where you are, you are getting 12.2v x 5.5A for a total of 67.1 watts out of your 100 Watt array (assuming you have the standard 2x50W panels).
No magic.

Without the MPPT controller you'd probably be seeing 4.6A at 14.4V instead--with the extra voltage wasted. And without the panels being aimed (which of course you can quickly try yourself) you'd probably see another 20-45% drop in the amperage as well.

There's an old old joke that I suppose I'd better repeat because some of the forum members will be unfamiliar with it:
A guy goes into a bar with his dog. The bartender says, sorry, we don't allow dogs in here. The guy says, but he's a TALKING dog, he's special. Bartender, having heard everything, says Yeah sure, let's hear him talk. If he can talk you both can have a drink for free, and he sets up two shots.
So the guy points up to the ceiling and ask the dog "What's up there?" and the dog goes "ROOF!" and the bartender pulls back the two shots and says uh-uuh, not good enough. He says look, no nonsense, let's see what he really knows. Who was the greatest baseball player of all time? And the dog goes "RUTH!" and the bartender physically throws 'em both out on the street.

The guy dusts himself off, looks at the dog, and the dog looks back at him and says "What, I shoulda said DiMaggio?"

The morale being, THE DOG TALKS AT ALL. It doesn't matter whether the dog really knows baseball--he's talking at all and that should be enough.

Amps here, watts there...It ain't a nuclear pile, it IS about as effective as a solar installation can get. Whether the massive structure and installation is worth the price, is what my math teacher used to call "a simple exercise left to the reader".

I've got the feeling they could cut a grand off the price and re-engineer a much trimmer model for marine use, but this "overkill" probably impresses the customers in the OEM field operations business--and there's more of them, with more budget money, than there are sailors.

The numbers, meantime...are best taken with a grain of salt and an eye for context. And it certainly has been an education about charging, I feel like I've gotten the rude surprise that "conventional" regulators, even the 3-4-stage ones, are really obsolete power wasters compared to MPPT technology and PWM-DC. And that's from battery and power folks--not from what SolarStik had to say. It's been a real eye opener.

[AmyJohnson]

just thought i'd mention to you that it looks like SS went and changed their image. They got a new website and it looks like they have refined quite a bit of their marketing hype. Maybe they were paying attention to you after all

cold down here today!

[hellosailor]

Amy-
I can tell you from speaking to the owner, he's the first one to say right up front that he's not an electrical engineer, he's not a super-techie, but he's eager. That, and they are marketing to emergency centers and the military--folks who can and do have electrical engineers on hand.
The charge controllers show amp hours--not watt hours. (At least, the ones SS is using show amp hours.) So, one could easily think that amp hours, into a dead battery, was a good way to measure performance. Of course 'dead' also pushes things beyond where sailors ought to go--unless you've got a job on the Styx ferry.
A lot of confusion--but the only "lies" I ever heard were from innocent end users, or from folks including myself, who sometimes said "watt" when we meant "amp" or made a simple math error--and conceded it without any fuss.

Will it replace engines on small craft? No, not quite. But if it replaces lawn jockeys and those pink plastic flamingoes (which are out of production now) it might catch on. For what it is, it certainly is a nice one.

Now, if one of the many companies promising prospective investors that they are "this close" to perfecting a triple layer, or five layer, or seven layer solar cell with three to four times the efficiency of everything else, would only make that breakthrough and give us some cheap solar POWER.

Meanwhile, I'm still pissed at Westinghouse. Reddy Killowatt promised us all that we'd have home nuclear power packs, the size of hot water heaters, by the time we grew up. Well, Westinghouse, I'M STILL WAITING.

[sailingdog]

HS-

What you need is a Mr. Fusion... coming soon to stores near you...

[SimonV]

Defender are still advertising the SS as giving 80-100 Amps in a 24 hour period. Thats with two 50W panels.

[hellosailor]

Defender are, or at least were, a quirky place. Bear in mind it is still a small private business--not a national chain. It used to be fun when someone said "We don't have anything like that, but let me go look in the basement" and you never knew what they'd come back up with.

You probably CAN get that many "amps" out of it in 24 hours. That's exactly the problem. Amps are meaningless, unless they are given for a specific load, i.e. at a specific voltage. 90 amps at 10 volts is the same 900 watts that would "only" be 62.5 amps at 14.4 volts. 62.5 doesn't sound the same as 90, does it? But with an MPPT controller, the same 900 watts could show up either way--depending on whether it was feeding a big dead battery bank, or a fully charged system with heavy loads running.
I think Defender also took multiple months before they stuck a price tag online and listed the SS at all, after they started selling it. I'm sure they'll catch up, sooner or later. Unless someone got lost in the new and bigger basement.

Not meaning any insult ot anyone, in another thread about cooking at:
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...-new-post.html
you'll see a member asking "How many amp hours for a chicken dinner?" about electric cookers. The real question is watts, not amps, but how many of us own watt meters?!

Sometimes you need precision guided missile co-ordinates to navigate, sometimes "About another hour down the road" is close enough.

[bestfriend]

Here it is!!!! Whoops! This isn't the wheat grass thread....... wait a min....where the.........

[artbyjody]

Originally Posted by bestfriend

Here it is!!!! Whoops! This isn't the wheat grass thread....... wait a min....where the.........

You are all over the map.....stop snorting your drink....

[bestfriend]

Wow Cam, did you really edit this down to 130 posts? Take out all the useless inane unrelated threads like this one?