measuring watts in a battery bank

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System
System Posts: 2,511 admin
in Advanced Solar Electric Technical Forum #1
Let me know if I am going about this the right way. If you have a 400 ah 24v battery bank that would have the potential to deliver 9600 watts, of course I would never run the bank down to 0. lets just say I would never go below 70%, that would be 2880 watts avalible. If I had a 60 watt bulb running for 10 hours, that would use 600 watts of the 2880 watts. leaving me with 2280 left in the bank. Would this be correct?
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  • crewzer
    crewzer Registered Users, Solar Expert Posts: 1,832 ✭✭✭✭
    #2
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    Re: measuring watts in a battery bank

    No. A Watt is a unit of power, or the rate at which energy is converted.

    A 24 V x 400 Ah battery bank (the same size as mine, BTW), contains 9,600 Watt∙hours (Wh) of energy. If you never drop the battery bank below a 70% state-of-charge, then the 30% consumed would be about 2,880 Wh, depending on the actual load. Powering a 480 W load for 6 hours would use 2,880 Wh.

    HTH,
    Jim / crewzer
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  • icarus
    icarus Solar Expert Posts: 5,436 ✭✭✭✭
    #3
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    Re: measuring watts in a battery bank

    All energy electrical measures need a time element to have them make any sense. One kilowatt generally means nothing, but a kilowatt/hour means alot.

    So a battery capacity measured in amps gives, in rough numbers the capacity of the battery to deliver that number of amps over some number of hours (or minutes or seconds for that matter).

    I suggest that you read the following links for some more info on how battery capacity is measure in the real world : http://www.batteryfaq.org/ http://www.rpc.com.au/products/batteries/car-deepcycle/carfaq4.htm#charge
    http://www.windsun.com/Batteries/Battery_FAQ.htm#Lifespan%20of%20Batteries

    Tony
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