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Solar power for Pellet stoves

Last post 09-05-2006, 3:13 PM by Bejammin. 1 replies.
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  •  09-04-2006, 2:29 AM 96833

    Solar power for Pellet stoves

    Just wondering if anyone knows anything about powering pellet stoves with photovoltaics.  The power demands are only the blower and auger but I am not sure about how much power those would require.
  •  09-05-2006, 3:13 PM 96857 in reply to 96833

    Re: Solar power for Pellet stoves

    Hi there, Callico. That one just depends on the power demand of the blower and the auger. I just did a quick search and was finding blowers rated 30-60 Watts. So assuming that your blower is running all of the time, you're going to need 1,440Watt-hours per day. The blower is likely running for less than that, but I'll go with those numbers for now. I'm leaving the auger out, because this is just for the sake of reference - these numbers will give you a bit of a picture, but you'd have to find out how much energy your system actually uses to know for sure.

    First off, you can't power the blower directly from solar panels, which produce direct current (DC). You will need Alternating Current (AC) at 120 Volts and 60Hz. Therefore, you'll need an inverter. As well, you need batteries to store the energy - you generally can't just hook panels directly up to an inverter. So you'll need batteries, an inverter, and your solar panels. Since you'll be using this in the winter, and I'm assuming you're somewhere in North America, you can count on only a few hours' of sunlight (equivalent) throughout the day at the darkest part of the winter. Depending where you are, that changes, but much of Canada and the Northern US gets no more than 2 hours' of sun energy (with one hour being basically an hour of the sunlight you'd get in a bright summer day in an hour at noon) in December/January.
    So you'd need around 3kW of panels, an adquately sized battery bank, and a small inverter (assuming that this blower is the only thing you would power). So we're talking about a pretty expensive system - possibly as much as $35,000.

    That number is way too high, of course - you could get a more efficient (or smaller) blower and cut the price in three. Reduce the number of hours the blower runs for (I assumed 24) and slash the price again by half or more. As it stands, you're probably looking at some very high numbers to do this - but if you change some of the equipment in the system, you might be able to do it for a few thousand dollars or less.

    The option that many people go with is a battery backup of some sort without the solar panels. If you only want to keep your pellet stove burning in a short term outage, that's the cheapest way to go. But if you're interested in getting a significant portion of your daily energy from solar, something like this might be a great way to start!
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