Home » LILO Handbook » Electricity

Energy Audit

An Energy Audit is basically just working out how much electricity you might use, and what size batteries, solar panels or wind turbines to get. If you're going to be spending money on any of these then it's worth spending a few minutes on your Energy Audit.

If you have any helpful Energy Audit sheets please post them here!

Your Energy Audit

How much electricity do I need to generate? Or rather, how much electricity do I (want to) use?

The first stage of working this out is to make a list of all your electrical appliances, write down how many watts or amps they use, and how long they run for each day. You may find that you run things in different ways according to the time of year - for example you'll use your lights more when you're on board in winter.

You'll then need to work out how many amp hours you use each day - that's just the amps multiplied by the hours. (On a 12v system one amp is 12watts, on a 24v system, it's 24v, and on 240v - yes, it's 240w).

So now you know how many amp-hours you use every day.

to be continued - can you help?

‹ Batteries up Solar Panels (Photovoltaics) ›
  • 8356 reads

Energy Audits - top quality

Here is a new generation tool for power estimation:
http://solargis.info/pvplanner/

Top quality energy audits services are provided by:
http://geomodelsolar.eu/

Energy Audit - Power Estimator

There is an alternative power estimator form available from here: www.solar-wind.co.uk/solar-wind-power-system-sizing.html

Smile

Electricity

If you have low voltage fluorescent lights, or (no!) incandescent ones, check out the newest Superbright LED's. They are cheap(ish) to buy, last for ever, and use a small fraction of the electricity for the same light output. they also come in a fairly warm colour, and don't flicker. Good stuff.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <a> <small> <sup> <sub> <blockquote> <code> <h2> <h3> <h4> <img> <br> <br /> <p> <div> <span> <b> <i> <table> <tr> <td>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Each email address will be obfuscated in a human readble fashion or (if JavaScript is enabled) replaced with a spamproof clickable link.
  • Every instance of second and third level headings (<h2> and <h3>) will be modified to include an id attribute for anchor linking.
  • Every instance of "<!--tableofcontents-->" in the input text will be replaced with a table of contents.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
- it's an anti spam thing. Sorry :-( If you can't work it out then press 'refresh' in your browser to get a new question.
Image CAPTCHA
Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.