A beep and a click. That's how it happened. We were finishing up the layout of a site that twill be launching this week, we heard a beep and a click, and then we had no power.
We haven't yet talked about the components of our solar setup, but I'll jumpstart the conversation by saying we knew what we were looking for in batteries, panels, charge controller, etc., but not so much with an inverter.
Inverters are the part of the system that converts the DC power (what solar panels spit out) into 110V AC power (what your computer eats). There are basically two types of AC inverters out there: pure sine wave and modified sine wave. Pure sine wave inverters have more even, steady power than modified, but they cost about 3 to 5 times more than comparable modified sine wave inverters.
Easily the most important pieces of our office equipment are our computers and servers, and experts can be divided on which type of inverters are best for computer equipment. So we went with a cheaper modified sine wave inverter, figuring that if we tried the cheaper option, we could always upgrade.
Eileen's computers and servers worked quite well with the modified sine wave inverter, but from the beginning, my setup buzzed constantly. It fell under the category of "oh, we'll have to get a pure sine wave inverter at some point" irritating, but otherwise everything was great.
Well, after 6 weeks of use, the loss of power from the inverter has settled the case quite clearly:
If you have computers, get a pure sine wave inverter. Avoiding that buzzing noise is reason enough.
Comments
Tate
November 7, 2007 3:28 PM
You're launching a website this week? Coolness!
When?
Andrew Brown
November 30, 2007 7:51 AM
You dont need a pure sine invertor.
You need a laptop with a 12v power supply.
Trust me ive been doing this for years.
Aaron
November 30, 2007 8:59 AM
Hi Andrew,
Using a laptop and 12-volt power is certainly a good way to go. However, it doesn't quite work for the way our computer cluster is setup.
We use several computers, one of which is a server for all of our projects. Desktops work much better in such an environment, so we chose to go a little larger in scope.
One of our friends suggested a couple of alternative methods of accomplishing the same goals without a pure sine inverter. We'll be posting on that when we get it set up.