I have a 100 W rigid solar panel including a charge controller that I currently only use for camping to charge batteries (also useful in an emergency at home). It strikes me as a waste that I could be generating more clean energy with equipment that I already have, but I don’t have anything in mind to use this energy for.
Obviously I could try to tie it into my home to run more of my household on solar, or buy more/bigger batteries to charge, but with 100 W of generation, it’s probably not worth it without a significantly increased investment.
I tried searching around online, and I found plenty of discussion for what to do with a whole house that generates excess capacity (mainly sell to the grid), but nothing really on what to do with small scale DC generation.
Anyone here have thoughts?
3 years seems pretty good for using a car battery outside of it’s preferred use case. I guess that depends on how good/bad you were about deep cycling it.
Currently, the batteries I’m using are my power tool batteries, which are 18V so they charge through a dedicated (12V) charger, and I have a little USB A/C and low powered inverter that uses them. I probably wouldn’t necessarily want to put my lithium batteries through every day cycling, though.
I’ve thought about generating hydrogen with it to use for experiments and such, but idk if I have the space for that.