Quote:
Originally Posted by bigben
All righty - I guess I don't understand. A 100 watt panel produces about 6 amps per hour. A residential refrig uses about 8 amps per hour with the compressor running. ....cut.....
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Ben, for all practical purposes, there isn’t such a thing as “Amps per hour”. Trying to use such units of measure is just going to lead to wrong estimates/answers in my opinion.
If your panel puts out 6 Amps at rated solar conditions, and you get about 5 hours of sun per day, then you’ll get 6 Amps X 5 hours, or 30 Amp-hours.
Amp-hours isn’t a real unit of energy, but since it’s assumed these systems are all at 12-Volts, then Amp-hour is used as if it were a measure of energy to compare systems.
As example, 30 Amp-hour X 12 Volts = 360 watt-hours, or more commonly expressed in kilowatt-hour as 0.360 kWh.
For reference, a Trojan T-105 golf-cart battery stores up to 1.5 kWh of energy (at 100%), so 0.36 kWh isn’t much when comparing to 4 batteries.