Victron Energy and we are currently installing solar panels in a sauna raft.
Let's go have a look. Now, the reason we are putting solar
panels and a television in a sauna boat is because the Swedes love their saunas, but they want to see their team win a gold medal in ice skating or skiing. But they're not going to do that if they got no power. Now Mick Ronson's team have been busy installing the solar system into the raft.
We've got the panels on the roof, they've
laid all the cable and there's various other components which have been installed which make the whole system work. So let's go and see and I'll talk you through it. Now all the energy is stored inside a
battery, but it's not just any battery it's the Victron LFE smart battery. Yes!
The lithium ion phosphate found in this has great cycling ability, which basically means you can charge it over and over again and it won't reduce its capacity.
Now,
it's pretty cold out here and that can reduce a battery's ability to hold its
charge, but it doesn't matter because with their app you can see what power
you've got all the time. It's as if they literally knew it was going to get
installed in a cold sauna in the middle of a lake in Sweden. Now before we choose our battery we need to know what size of
battery we need, and for that we need to know what it's going to be powering. In our setup we're going to have two tellies and a light at 50 watts each, so
that's a hundred and fifty watts.
But we can add a little bit extra: an extra
100 watts for people to charge phones and just plug extra bits and bobs
in. Now then, we've got 250 watts in a sauna on one session. You'd probably want
to be in there for about five hours and maybe two sessions in a day, so
that's 10 hours of 250 watts, which if you add all that up is 2,500 watts or
2.5 Kilowatt hours. So we need a battery that can give us 2.5 Kilowatt hours.
Yesterday they were busy installing these solar panels on the roof. Now they've put them on aluminium
profiles because it's good to have an air gap underneath the solar panel for
heat dissipation. Of course they want to be facing upwards and hopefully to the
sun. Where is the Sun gone? Gone! But you don't just install any solar panel.
You need to do calculations so you get the right one.
Calculations! So we've got
our 2.5 Kilowatt hour battery we need to charge. On average you get about
5.5 Hours of optimal sunlight in a day so if we divide that up, a 600 watt solar
panel should do the job. Victor has got an online calculator to work out the
best system for where you live. The EasySolar system which we are
installing has an MPPT charger and an inverter inside it.
However, if you are
installing a fixed electrical system you need a certified installer to do the
process for legal insurance and safety reasons. That's why I'm not doing it and I've got this fella. Now you're gonna need yourself a charge controller and an inverter. All comes
in one box.
The inverter basically converts the battery power into mains
power, and the charge controller uses a maximum power point tracking algorithm
which basically deals with all the power from the solar panels and distributes it
into the battery according to the conditions. Now you need to size these up.
We've got 600 Watts worth of solar panels and a 12 volt battery. Divide 600
by 12, gives you 50, we need a 50 amp charge controller. If you need help
with this, click on the link below and you can get in contact with your nearest
Victron dealer.
Right, everything's fitted. We've got solar panels on the
roof, we've got the battery and we've got the inverter charger. Now, last base is
this color control unit that's gonna get fitted on the wall and what this
basically does give you all the information: tells us our battery's 100%
we're drawing 24 watts of power from the solar panels, and it's not that bright,
which is great, and this one zero whatts, that's because we got nothing
connected. That's the next job.
Right, everything's connected. Let's give
it a test: three, two one, yes! Let's have a sauna party.
The coat can come off! There we are: a solar-powered floating
sauna. Might be a crazy idea but it works. Thanks for watching..
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