It has been about four days since the AmericanDry Basement people finished their work here, but it is looking good.
Before:
After:
I am working on the solar/battery back up system plans. There was a battery back up pump system offered with the system, but I think I can do better for about the same cost. What I want to do is have a 2120 Ah battery bank and a 2400 watt inverter connected to 300 watt or greater solar panel. This will operate on solar power most of the time. If the battery bank drops below 50 percent discharge level, it will switch to the AC grid power to power the pumps and recharge the batteries. This will give me about a 30 percent reserve (in case it attempts to switch back to AC power during a power outage). The idea is to provide back up power and offset some of the power used by the pumps. I will also run the Solar Hot Water system off of this set up.
The grid seems to be pretty reliable around here. The longest outage was for about 10 hours after we had a tornado touch down about 1/2 mile away. Other than that, we have had perhaps two or three other outages of about 2 hours or less. It helps that we are only about a mile away from the sub station.
I will do a separate post on how I sized that system and other considerations for the design.
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But the ‘wet’ look is so very in, and it has that certain j’ne sais swamp :)
If you don’t mind me asking, can you ball park how much the solar energy set up will be? Do you have lots of experience with them? Too bad you can’t go swimming in your basement anymore (looks great).
Ethan, I guestimated the size based on the pump rating. I am going to do an actual load calculation for the next post. Ball park, I’d say the solar/battery backup will be about $1,800.00 or so but there are a number of ways to work this.
The ADBS sales guy wanted $1,000.00 for a separate 12 DC pump and battery with charger. Kind of a low end solution as the pump only had about 1/2 the capacity of the installed AC pump.
I want to get an inverter and a larger battery bank to power the AC pumps. I am working on a blog post about this and should have it done in a day or so.
I have no experience with solar power but I’m all about alt. fuels. You should check out the before and after blog carnival I have at http://www.oneprojectcloser.com this is a perfect candidate and your blog is a good read.