Help Request for unique system requirements

Hello everyone. I hope I am posting this in the right forum. I need a little help understanding how inverters work or which might be suitable for our situation. I have an indoor facility for raising lizards of all things, and use a lot of electricity for basking lights. Each cage uses a 50-75 watt halogen spotlight to provide basking heat for diurnal reptiles. We are building a small off grid building and I would like to build a stand alone solar powered system to provide this lighting. Since we follow the natural solar cycle, we really only need to have lights on when the sun is out.
Right now we are using 110 volt halogen lamps. I would be excited if I could learn that an inverter would simply convert the DC voltage to AC voltage, and then simply dim the lights when there isn't enough power to run them at full voltage.... this would provide a natural cycle indoors as clouds and weather influence the sunlight supply.
I am guessing that rather than reduce ac voltage, the inverter will probably shut off when the power drops below a preset minimum. Can someone let me know if this is indeed the case, or I can source an inverter that could do what i need it to do?
My other thought was to switch to 12 volt halogen lighting and just connect directly to a 12 volt parallel array.... but this severely limits my panel and bulb selection.
Thanks in advance, Lance
Right now we are using 110 volt halogen lamps. I would be excited if I could learn that an inverter would simply convert the DC voltage to AC voltage, and then simply dim the lights when there isn't enough power to run them at full voltage.... this would provide a natural cycle indoors as clouds and weather influence the sunlight supply.
I am guessing that rather than reduce ac voltage, the inverter will probably shut off when the power drops below a preset minimum. Can someone let me know if this is indeed the case, or I can source an inverter that could do what i need it to do?
My other thought was to switch to 12 volt halogen lighting and just connect directly to a 12 volt parallel array.... but this severely limits my panel and bulb selection.
Thanks in advance, Lance
Comments
Some of the problems with direct use of solar energy is cloudy days with very low output and Cloud edge effect with higher than normal output. I have not seen a controller that works without the battery bank to buffer those highs and low effectively. I think even with 12V lighting you will need a battery setup to at least act as a buffer. The charge and discharge depth could be fairly shallow since night the usage is not required, you just need to watch the cloudy day issues of battery deep discharge.
AC is much easier to work with, I assume you use timers to control the living now?
|| Midnight Classic 200 | 10, Evergreen 200w in a 160VOC array ||
|| VEC1093 12V Charger | Maha C401 aa/aaa Charger | SureSine | Sunsaver MPPT 15A
solar: http://tinyurl.com/LMR-Solar
gen: http://tinyurl.com/LMR-Lister ,
My guess is that the lizards will pretend that it is a cloudy, sunless day, and stay inside and play pool, or something(?).
But, whatta I know? Vic
Dave: I had thought about using a small battery bank as a buffer but was hoping it wouldn't be necessary. I guess I could use a low voltage disconnect to keep it from deep discharging when there is extended periods of cloudiness. I live in San Diego, so it wouldn't be often.
Lance
My thought would be to try running 3 x Kyocera Ku265 in series, (3x38.3v) so approx 115v DC ..... might be an interesting experiment.
Does anyone want to help me try to guess how many 50 watt bulbs I could keep running fairly bright with a system this size and little or no battery backup? I would be happy if I could run two bulbs per panel but don't know if that's enough reserve capacity.
Lance
2.1 Kw Suntech 175 mono, Classic 200, Trace SW 4024 ( 15 years old but brand new out of sealed factory box Jan. 2015), Bogart Tri-metric, 460 Ah. 24 volt LiFePo4 battery bank. Plenty of Baja Sea of Cortez sunshine.