I just went through an experiment at Bathurst (Mt.Panorama) circuit this past week. I know this is a little off topic, but gives you an insight to what the result can be.
The Mrs and I went camping and I wanted to go all solar and battery powered. She was very dubious about it all, and I said "Don't worry about it".
We had a Waeco 60lt fridge, a large HID-LED light (used in the mining industry for a headlight), a 300w inverter (12V) and a laptop.
I had 2 solar panels, both of the "Jackeroo" brand. One was just the panel and one was a panel with a battery pack (7ah).
Each panel gave me 13w at 0.75amp. The panel with the battery pack (i'll call this one a later model or 2 ver) had a switch that you could switch between 12v and 24v.
The older one went for $119 and is now sold out. The later one went for $140, but 1 week later, when I bought it went up to $199, I was &%%&^%.
Every thing I chose was 24v as much as possible, due to the fact that it draws roughly 1/2 the amps of 12v.
For 8 days of camping (in cool weather) I never ran out of battery power.
These solar panels did exactly what I wanted to do and more.
The fridge was set to -7c, and the laptop (using the 12v-240v inverter), the light and all the other stuff was sporadic use.
It is now my intention to run these panels, whilst using the scope.
It will be on 2 x 12v batteries (unsure of series or parallel yet). I do have a 240v power plug for the microstepping motor setup, but unsure how much power that will draw. I haven't done the sums yet. But the concept is to power the scope off 2 x 12v batteries. However the down side is carrying these 2 batteries in the car. For me it's no issue as I am used to moving large batteries around all day. The car handled 4 largish batteries (tractor) and all the camp gear, so it's all good.
The batteries I used were of a standard tractor/car battery design (not deep cycle), they were rated to about 100ah each.
As Malcom says, all lights should be of HID LED. The light I used draws 3 amps to get started and gets down to about 1 amp just to keep going.
It ran on 24v (2 x 100ah 12v batteries) for 4 days about 4-6 hours each day. Without a recharge, but I know it was getting low, might of got 1-2 extra nights of power but that would be it.
Even though I bought the panels for camping, I just solved how I will get power for the scope out in the bush. This is just magic.
Do your sums first, as power requirements judge what panels you use.
) around the 80w, but time and money got away from me, so 2 x 13w had to do.
