ecosophia | Frugal Friday

Welcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.

Rule #1: this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc. I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2: this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3: please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about. Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This is sort of vague, but repair parts in general. We have found over the years that many bits and bobs of our various machines and setups (such as our cobbled-together solar charging setups) break sooner than expected, and many of the replacement parts you can source online break very quickly as well, especially if you try to economize with cheaper parts, but it’s not always clear which brands are good and which are crummy. And it really burns when you spend 4x as much on an allegedly high-quality American-made part only to have it break just as quickly. When we find a brand that doesn’t break quickly, sometimes it later disappears, becomes expensive, or they change the manufacturing process so it becomes crummy too. So it can be worth stocking up on a few spares for later use or other projects. Ultimately not using parts with electronic or plastic components would be ideal, but that’s obviously very limiting.

Re: your question on solar generators, we’ve owned a couple of the plug and play ones and they’ve been convenient but not the most durable, and not easily repairable. I think you’re better off building your own; it’s a bit cheaper to begin with but the real savings comes when some minor part malfunctions and you don’t have to eat the cost of the battery.

For instance here is the solar setup we use to run a small submersible irrigation pump. Often it must run for multiple hours when there is not much sun so we have a battery. Obviously it’s not glamorous or as portable as a pre-manufactured one but it is simple to put together.

Thanks for this, I am so glad someone had picture to show her. While there a ccouple ways to do this, they are very similar, could you tell us the components you have and what order they are wired together ? It is so good for everyone to see example in use like this

Atmospheric River

Yeah, the picture isn’t the most helpful because the system is currently disabled for the season. Hopefully this diagram will be more useful. Happy to explain/elaborate on anything that’s not clear:

This system is too small for a freezer, but the basic sequence should be workable. Honestly it might be cheaper to buy a DC freezer than to build and mainstain a solar AC system depending on how many amps the freezer draws. Our chest freezer is like 2 amps but our upright is 5 and I wouldn’t build this system for the upright. More amps means you’ll need a bigger inverter, and the inverter uses power to do its thing, so then you need more/bigger batteries and/or panels. If you can find a DC thermostat that only turns the inverter on when needed, that would also help a lot, but I’ve never looked into that sort of thing. The most expensive part is going to be the batteries so that’s what I’d minimize. It might even be enough just to cool the freezer during the day (so no battery) if it’s a well-filled chest freezer and you don’t open it when the power’s out. But YMMV.

Yes, this would work well for a freezer if the inverter is changed out for a 800W or larger one, they are about the same size and come with clips to connect to the battery. SO, the cigarette lighter DC socket can be dispensed with and a larger inverter can clip straight to the battery terminals. Thanks for a clear drawing. I hope this will help people esp. as it is something you have been using for years and from your own experience see that it is a better solution than the bundled "generators"

A small battery in the sequence might be needed to keep the power output smoothed out, may depends what it is connected too. A small battery is useful in any case, as you could power that freezer in the day when the sun is out, then carry that battery inside for a light.

Yes, panel sizecanbeadjusted by the energy star ratings of thefreezer, 200W of panels is generally considered to give an average of 1kWh a day, more on longer days.

Atmospheric RIver

Yeah, the cigarette lighter socket was mostly so we could use a cheap car inverter which was what we could get our hands on at the time, but not necessary at all if you do a bigger inverter. We mostly pull straight from the battery for our pump which is DC so the inverter is only for little stuff like our aerator. We didn’t originally have the low voltage disconnect but if we aren’t paying attention we’ll drain the battery sometimes so we added that later to save our battery.

what are you using for a low votage disconnect ? Is there something cheaper than using a charge controller for that ? I am slowly getting items together to get power for lights back to my barn, and yeah, I dont want to drain down the batteries

We use a cheap one from Amazon tbh—if you search low voltage disconnect or low voltage protector they will show up, for like $25. The issue is that they can be a bottleneck that keeps you from drawing full amperage from the battery. So what we did is we put a starter relay inline (the actual power flows through the relay) with beefy terminals so it doesn’t constrict the flow of electricity. The relay has a switch that gets flipped by the low voltage disconnect if the battery is low, but the electricity doesn’t actually flow through the low voltage disconnect to get where its going, so the amount you can draw from the battery in real time isn’t constricted, only the degree to which you can discharge it. Hopefully that makes sense.

Makes sense to me, and for a small low priced set up for one item,like yours or the freezer example, would make sense.

Thanks for telling me your limitations, so given that my hypothetical one is not just for lights realy, I may trench back to my studio rental eventually, so they have a fridge and a couple lights during outages too, I may stick with using a C40 or C60 charge controller as the low voltage disconnect, they will pass thru lots of amps.

thanks

Atmospheric RIver

You two are inspiring me to move my “learn about DC solar charging” up the list of All The Things To Learn! :)

Thank you!

Frugal Friday

Re: Tariffs

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changes for freezer

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no subject