Ivan's Star Base "Mara Down's".
Salmon Gum's, Western Australia.

Latitude 33 degrees South.

Commissioned December 2003. Hybrid solar / diesel power system for farm house, work shop
and four stand shearing shed. 12 Kva backup diesel generator rarely run's, due to the outstanding performance of my "splayed" solar array design. In fact when it was first installed, Ivan informed me that he didn't have to run the diesel for 5 months ! Actually, it was the performance of this particular system that finally convinced me that facing all panels directly North in a domestic power system is often incorrect, especially with the superior wide angle performance of the Uni-Solar triple junction panel. See installation "Starbase Virtual Rurality" for further explanation.

Power system.

24 x UNI-SOLAR US-64 Advanced, amorphous, thin film, triple junction photo-voltaic panels. 1536 peak watts. Equivalent to 2000 watts of old technology crystalline panels @ 50 deg C cell temperature. ( typical) Innovative twin wing, "splayed array". NNE & NNW. Nett daily energy production (after system losses) is 7500 watt-hours in Summer. and 4400 watt-hours in Winter.

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  1 x Plasmatronic PL-40 regulator / controller with SH-200 current shunt and PLS2 analog to digital converter. Allows all energies generated and consumed to be observed, this being the key to successful advanced power system operation.
• 
  24 x EXIDE 2 Volt 1080 ampere-hour, deep cycle battery cells. Connected in series, to yield 48 volt x 1080 = 51,840 watt-hours. ( 51.8 Kilowatt-hours ) The average daily design load of the star base is 7500 watt-hours, so this translates to a week of storage. The 1080 cells are the smallest Exide make with double redundant terminals, ie, twin positives and twin negatives. This is much safer than single pairs of terminals, because the potential sparking of a loose link is negated. Explosion hazard with large wet cells such as the Exide's due to hydrogen evolution is a real danger, which is why we now use the UNI-SUN maintenance free energy blocks, with built in flame arrestors.
  
  
• 1 x SOLAR ENERGY AUSTRALIA SEAP-3K8-48 True Sine Wave Inverter. 3800 watts continuous rating, 4500 watts for 0.5 hours, 10,500 watts for 10 seconds. These units are well on their way to becoming a legend of the outback. Powerful, stable, reliable. Runs the home, workshop and the shearing shed with Sunbeam overhead gear. Freakin awesome...the local sparky couldn't believe it. The only thing it wouldn't run was the press, but hell whaddaya expect !!
  
  
• 1 x SSL Industrial grade battery charger. 48 Volt, 50 Amps. Delivers 2.5 kilowatts input to the battery per hour of genset running. Old fashioned transformer type design, but reliable. Hardly does anything in this particular situation, but good to have in reserve. These old "clunker's" are only 50% efficient, and thus require around 5 Kva of genset capacity to run them at full power. The more modern switch mode chargers have generally made them obsolete, but be careful, as some switch mode chargers do not like dirty, distorted 240 volt A.C waveform inputs from cheap, defective or overloaded genset alternators.
  

Notes.

Another classic Remote Area Power System from yours truly ! You have probably noticed that there are no "Old Technology" crystalline type solar panels on my website ? That's because after 15 years field experience with them,
I threw them in the bin in 1997 when Uni-Solar released the "New Technology".

In my opinion crystalline is rubbish, and well past it's use by date. Fragile, heavy, cumbersome, obsolete, ancient, unsustainable "space junk" out of the 1960's . 36 fragile, wafer thin, crystalline cells under a pain of glass ? That take 10 years to recover the energies embodied in their construction ? That then start to malfunction due to intercell soldering cracking up due to dry joints and thermal stress, and incessant expansion and contraction of ribbon wire connections over years ? You're not going to save the planet with that rubbish, and look at the brand names on most of it ! For the sake of the future and all living things, WAKE UP . Vote UNI-SOLAR 1. Super Solar Technology of the 21st century.