Does anyone know if feeding power back into the grid is allowed in Alberta? Seems to me that it is but the hoops are almost impossible for the little guy to jump through.

Interesting for sure but the cost hardly justifies it, its not that much cheaper than regular hydro and the initial costs must be phenominal.

But think of all the double headed fish we can have! jk ;)

don't forget that the solar foot print we live in will only give us about 50 to 60% of the rated power at best in the summer and down to 30 to 40% in the winter. also using an inverter and running AC equipment is very waistfull in DC power, to do it right you would have to get DC pumps, storage batteries.

here is an example. a 50 watt load will drain 236 amphours in 24 hours, this is a DC 50 watts so for an AC load you can add 10% so 21ish hours. this means you will need atleast four 236AH 6volt batteries as you don't want to discharge below 50% if possible. this also means you will need to be able to put that 236AH back into the battery box in aproximatly the 6 hours of good sun we have for solar purposes. a 110 watt pannel will put 9AH in every hour so this is 56AH. so 4 of thoes pannels will keep up.

so lest see, 1600-2400.00 worth of solar pannels (depending on price) 50.00 for a regulator, and 720.00 for good batteries. all this to save maybe 60.00 a year. if you buy the expensive pannels(which you would if you are smart as cheep ones are rated at a lower voltage and don't actualy preform as good) you are looking at 53 years for the pannels to pay themselves off.

now a better alternative would be the 110 watt wind generator from cannuck rubber, you still need the good batteries but it is 400 instead of 2400 and puts out 24/7, if there is a wind over 14mph (the thing you have to read in the small print) if wind is slower they put out less. there are also several links on the internet for building wind generators from car altanators and such.

Steve

Wind's the way to go.

For our high arctic auto weather stations used to run solar only and large battery packs but have been adding wind generators. We've been able to reduce the size of the battery packs because of with a relatively light wind, can dump the current into the battery through the charger. They over come the issue of frost build up, cloud and fog and of course have the panels beat on that 24 hr darkness thing.

Still think long way to go before cost effective to run a reef tank.

the best method of solar power doesnt use pannels it uses parabolic mirrors to heat water in a pipe then use that water to turn a turbine, its simple to build and generates AC current, so no need for wastefull inverters and no pollution manufacturing pannels.
but large scale projects are more efficient than many small ones so it makes more sense to buy power from the local supplier (depending on your price) but in bc power is relitivly cheap 6.5cents per KW/H

you could probably use it for heating the tank quite economically. the most efficient method of domestic solar panels is pool heating. supposed to save tons of money.

240w Costco solar panels and equip.

http://www.costco.ca/Browse/Product....=1&topnav=&s=1


900W Wind Generator

http://www.costco.ca/Browse/Product....=1&topnav=&s=1