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Solar Energy Find of the Week
By Solar energy | January 21, 2009
Solar Energy Find of the Week
This solar energy journey uncovers lots of people and companies making great strides to make solar energy an easy part of our lives. While I don’t yet have solar panels on my roof (we’re working on making if affordable so as not to upset the family bean counter), more and more smaller—affordable—solar gadgets are coming to market.
How about solar powered WIFI? This would be a great asset during hurricane season.
From the Meraki website:
Features & Benefits
Cover Hard to Reach Areas
The Solar is ideal for providing coverage to remote or hard to get to places. Whether you have just a few access points that are hard to wire, or an entire area without power (e.g., fair grounds, parks and rural areas), Meraki Solar can be deployed quickly to extend your wireless network.
Reduce Hassle and Planning
Even when existing power sources are available, the time required to plan for and secure rights to that power may be prohibitively expensive. In a business district, for example, each building rooftop or storefront is owned by a different entity, and securing permission from each owner can be time consuming and complex. With the Solar, you need time on the roof, but you do not need access to local power.
Save Time and Money
In many cases the single most expensive line item in an Outdoor network installation is the time and material required to cable and install an access point. The Solar drastically reduces this cost, requiring only 30 minutes of a trade-level installer. Since there are no electrical or network cabling runs, there are no electricians involved. This translates into a significant cost savings in many applications.
Solar is Green
The Meraki Solar runs on its own state-of-the-art solar-charged battery, and requires no connection to the local electrical grid. The Solar is incredibly energy efficient and has limited impact on the environment.
Topics: Solar Gadgets | 1 Comment »
January 21st, 2009 at 2:38 pm
I had designed something similar for my brother who lived on a farm that was just about 1/4 mile from a broadband connection. We used off the shelf components from the Alternative Energy Store. We used one 110W, 12V Everegreen Solar panel (he’s in Maine and we needed more solar juice for lower light), a Phocos CX10 solarcharge controller, a IronRidge UNI-SP/01X side of the pole mount for the panel, and 7.5V, 2A voltage regulator from Solar Converters (model SORPPT12242R7.5) to bring the voltage down from the 12V battery bank to what the wireless router and cable modem needed. He bought two Trojan T105 batteries locally (225AH, 6V each) and put them in series for 12V. He had to jerry-rig his own box to mount it all in outside, but I think the whole package cost him around $1000.