All Things Solar...

[Captain Goddammit]

From an engineer's point of view, I can't see how practical solar power is for a one week event. While solar power is great in the desert over a long period of time with a large storage bank, when it absolutely, positively HAS to work during one 7 day period the risk is too great. A couple of cloudy or dusty days and you are sunk. It would be something interesting to tinker with, but I would not want to rely on it for my supper or anything key to my experiance.

Get a diesel generator and run biodiesel in it. It will be more reliable.

As for grey water, solar evaporation works but with the same limitations. Get a couple of coolish, cloudy days and you are swamped. Get rain and you are fucked. Better to be prepared to haul it all out and consider any evaporation as a blessing rather than rely on it.

In my take-it-or-leave-it, un-solicited opinion, this is the sanest advice!
All the other business about evap ponds, wind & solar power (which DON'T produce very much current unless you have a prohibitively expensive and large-scale setup) etc. are fine for hobby-type use. If it's all about the challenge and fun of setting up a system, by all means, do it, we're all out there to play with stuff.
If you just want reliable, practical power and water, get a QUIET generator, and just haul your water back out. 33 gallon garbage cans are great for this, pour in a little bleach to prevent excess reeking. Dump them at a rest stop with an "RV" dump.
I just do this, and have all the power and water I can use, no hassle.

OK... thinking about it, this post really isn't much in the spirit of "All Things Solar"... the Captain shuts up and goes away now...

[nick]

Generators work, especially for big camps, but even the best ones also have drawbacks.

+ They make noise and pollution that annoy the neighbors -- even the quiet ones (and not everyone bring quiet ones!)

+ It's not so much the total amount of gas generators burn that makes them a pain, but the work of trucking fuel up there, storing it in the shade, and filling the tank without spilling on the playa. Don't forget to give away or use all your gas before you leave for home.

+ Also annoying: anytime you want a bit of juice -- to make one margarita for instance -- you've got to fire up the genny...

A battery bank, which is what we've been hauling for the last few years, coupled with a quiet generator is a step forward: We have minimal power whenever we want and only need to run the generator to charge the batteries for a few hours or when we need lots of juice.

Last year we made an impromptu arrangement with our neighbor who had solar panels mounted on the roof of his truck -- he would charge our battery bank during the day and we would let him charge his electric tryke at night when we ran our generator.

Unless you are a mega dance-camp, you can probably do a lot more than you think with 1-2 100-Amp-hour deep-cycle batteries, a small inverter and an 80-watt solar panel. Of course, considering the amount of wind up there, I'm half-thinking of getting one of these:

http://www.affordable-solar.com/sowi.html

-nick-

[geekster]

How is that 80-watt solar panel going to hold up the charge through two consecutive cloudy days? It isn't uncommon. The week before the event this year saw rain. As a matter of fact, 2 or 3 consecutive days of clouds and rain that time of year isn't all that uncommon either.

If you are going to do something like that I would suggest at a minimum arriving with a fully charged storage bank capable of supplying all the power you would need for 48 hours. And that still might not be enough.

Also, better go bigger than 80 watts. An 80-watt unit is going to deliver 80 watts for about 4 hours of the day, if that. Morning and evening hours will provide less, must less if it is covered with dust.

[burningflyer]

Five years of solar experience at burning man has shown that it is an alternative that works. Of course you arrive with fully charged bats and need to consider your load, but we in the AEZ continually have produced an excess of solar power beyond our storage capacity and have usually done it by noon.

If solar won't work for you, it most likely will be because your power consumption exceeds a practical battery storage system. Although I did eat some wonderful turkey cooked in a full size 220 volt oven powered by desert sun.

So those who say it can't be done can stick to their stinky, noisy, polluting gennies, or at least speak from experience with solar on the playa.

[geekster]

Wow, awesome. How large was your PV array?

[burningflyer]

Reverend Gadget's solar motorhome treated the AEZ to turkey and he runs an electric water heater as well. Mucho panels and batts.

http://reverendgadget.com/subpage.html

My small camp gets by faithfully with 3 marine/rv bats, charge controller and a single 80 watt panel, inverter. Mix of DC lighting, AC LED strings, art cart, drills, saws, fans, gizmo's. Total investment to date ia around $500, and it's powering my holiday lights right now!

[Captain Goddammit]

Five years of solar experience at burning man has shown that it is an alternative that works. Of course you arrive with fully charged bats and need to consider your load, but we in the AEZ continually have produced an excess of solar power beyond our storage capacity and have usually done it by noon.

If solar won't work for you, it most likely will be because your power consumption exceeds a practical battery storage system. Although I did eat some wonderful turkey cooked in a full size 220 volt oven powered by desert sun.

So those who say it can't be done can stick to their stinky, noisy, polluting gennies, or at least speak from experience with solar on the playa.

I speak from experience with solar on the playa. Reverend Gadget is a friend of mine, and I know all about his all-solar GMC bus. It has a lot more solar panels than most could afford, but he's a first-class scrounger and came up with 'em.
I like to run airconditioning in mine. (And a lot of people who were invited out of the heat for a chill-out or a chance to sleep during the hot day will probably come to my defense when I get called a softy for running A/C!)

Even Gadget's setup doesn't sustain A/C, not enough power.

I'm not saying it can't be done (usually the wrong thing to say to a burner), just that it's not really practical unless your electrical load is fairly small.

No rivalry with AEZ is intended, by the way, hell, my boat was reserved almost exclusively for AEZ friends of mine on burn night...

[III]

i think i'm having dinner with gadget and kinchasa tomorrow.

does that make me a name dropper?