PV Gap

Carole Said:

lighting my pond with solar panels?

We Answered:

There are solar lighting controllers that control charging the battery during the day, and then turning on and off the lights at night. It will also manage turning off the lights if the batteries get too low. http://www.altestore.com/store/Charge-Co…

The size of the battery and solar panels depends on how much power you use. You should definitely use the lowest power lights you can, LED's are great for solar. I haven't used this site, but they do have a selection of outdoor 12V DC lights that should work great, http://www.theledlight.com/landscape.htm… Once you decide how many lights you want, you would add up the watts of all of them, multiple it by the number of hours you want them on (doesn't make sense to have them on in the middle of the night when no one is there). You will end up with the number of watt hours you need a day (for example, 12W of lights total x 6 hours = 72watt hours (wh)). Put that number into an off-grid calculator like this one, http://www.altestore.com/store/calculato… select 12V, and it will tell you how big of a battery bank and how big of a solar panel you need. For my example, I need a 17ah 12V battery and a 20watt panel.