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Solar Powered Audio

With all the discussion about bad AC quality, the necessity for power conditioning, and the emergence of several products that utilize battery power supplies to overcome noisy AC, it occurs to me that an audio system powered exclusively on a solar powered/battery system would be ideal. Solar panels on the roof. A bank of storage batteries in the attic or crawlspace. Bingo! Pure, quiet, dedicated power!

Is anyone in the southwest or west doing this...or even considering this?
tvad
gordus
118 posts
 
Hi Edesilva,
Transformers don't do the energy storage, their job is simply to transform the 120v feed to whatever is required by the unit in question... say 40v. The diodes rectify / convert the 40v ac power to about 56v dc (in this case) which is fed to the supply caps, which do the storage as well as further filtering / smoothing of the dc feed. Hopefully someone who actually knows what they're talking about can correct my inaccuracies!!!
tvad OP
9,467 posts
 
Pretty good article in today's (7/30/06) Los Angeles Times Real Estate section about solar power. The article offers quite a few information resources.
edesilva
768 posts
 
Hmm... I always thought that transformers also stored energy as well--but this is memories of college physics from many moons ago. As an energy transfer device, however, I've gotta believe the transient load response is a heckuva lot faster than a battery. Has anyone compared the voltage drops on transients from a battery supply to a 115VAC supply through a transformer?

The caps in an AC/DC power supply smooth out lumpy voltage out of a rectifier; wouldn't they perform the same function if put in parallel with a battery supply in leveling out voltage drops caused by placing too high of a transient current demand on a battery? Anyone do this?
billbench
23 posts
 
Someone posted this site at AA for purposes of getting off the grid. They sell everything you need (I think...). Art Bell would be excited about this post.

http://www.solardyne.com/index.html
twl
3,251 posts
 
Been doing it for years. Works quite well.
Takes a little bit of work, and knowing what you want to accomplish, and selecting suitable gear for the purpose.

It's just a simple battery power system that is recharged by the solar panels.
Not for high-power amp applications, typically.

Great for a low power SET application.

Teres makes a battery power supply for their TT.
I had a custom made David Berning SET-ZOTL amp built by David for this application.
You can run a battery powered preamp, or if you need to you can use a high-quality pure sinewave inverter to run any gear that has to run on 120vac.
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