Frugal Friday

[ecosophia]

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!

Comments

Re: changes for freezer

[(Anonymous)]

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

Re: changes for freezer

[jenniferkobernik]

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.

Re: changes for freezer

[(Anonymous)]

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

Re: changes for freezer

[temporaryreality]

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