Air conditioner 125 volt 15 amps: how many solar panels and batteries to run 24/7?

It would just be cheaper to run the power lines back to the house but what ever you do DONT take electricity from the drop above the meter for free at night. That would be wrong! Lol & sticking it to the man!

You would need 6 300 watt solar panels, US price around $300 per, And a minimum of 4 batteries. You are going to have major problems only having 5 hours of sun though.I am not sure you could get it to work with only that much sunlight. Along with an inverter and some other controller units. If you live in an area that has some wind, a wind generator would knock it down to where you would only need 2 solar panels and a small 500 watt wind generator. The problem you are going to have is trying to run it all the time. I had an AC that size in my camping van, it took about 20 minute to run two batteries down so low that the inverter started to sound the low battery alert. If I left it running it did ok, and I had an over-sized alternator for it. I had a 150 amp heavy truck alternator. A swamp cooler would be a lot less energy, you could easily recycle about 95% of the water. I know this is the 21st century and this may sound a little nuts, but with only 5 hours of daylight, if you have some trees you could use for burning you could build an outdoor steam engine cheaper and it would charge a lot more batteries in a lot less time. Plus you could run off the steam engines generator for as long as you had a fire day or night. Even a small 55 gallon water tank would give you plenty of head for the steam. You could easily run a 6000 watt generator off of it and have plenty of electricity while it was running. Just a thought, I had to resort to some extreme measures when I bought some Montana land in 2000, it was 6 miles to the nearest utility pole.

Unless you have a good charge controller, the battery will never charge, as a lead acid battery requires 15 volts to charge. Ans you don't tell us the capacity of the battery? Is the solar cell only 15 watts? That is 1 amp if it develops 15 volts. Assuming the solar panel is good for 15 watts and 15 volts, that is only 1 amp. so you are charging the battery with 1 amp and discharging it with 15 amps, so how long you can do that depends on the size of the battery. But it will discharge in at most 5 hours with a large battery, and the solar panel will take several days to charge it up again at 1 amp. The best you will be able to do with that 15 amp load is perhaps 1 hour a day, which is 12 watt-hours. The solar panel will be able put back 1 amp for 12 hours at 15 volts, which is 15 watt-hours, which will give you perhaps 12 watt-hours in the battery. .

You are probably going to need about 60 panles and 60 batteries....you will also need a very good power inverter. Also consider the power it takes to invert 12 volt DC battery power in to 120 volts AC power required for an air conditioner. You might consider also trying to find a 12 or a 24 volt unit cooler.

You would be better off buying a generator. Solar panels and batteries are not going to run an air conditioner for long if at all.....it might be cheaper to have the power company run the power.

120 Volt Solar Panel

Amp Air Conditioning

Just do the arithmetic.

Load 1875W * 24 Hr = 45000 W/Hr.s

Sunlight 5Hr. 45000/5 = 9000w/hr. capacity Required

That's 60 panels.

Notes:

The air conditioner will probably cycle, (not draw full load all the time).

There will be inefficiencies in your system, and cloudy days when

you don't get anywhere near full output from those panels.

You probably want at least two days worth of capacity in those batteries, and some excess panel capacity.

Partial Mat. Cost Est.:

Panels ~$200 /ea = ~$12,000

Batteries ~$100/1200W/Hr. = ~$7.500

2Kw. Charger/Inverter panel = ~$500

Can you spell 'impractical?"

Stick a swamp cooler in the window and run a pole down through it. Hang a vertical blower inside and a vertical windmill up above the roof.

Both blowers are connected to the pole. As the wind blows the top wheel and the blower inside the swamp cooler turns pulling air through the watered down hog hair. You seep water in it through tiny tiny holes on top using a float and reservoir above the hog hair from accumulated rain water tank mounted on the edge of the roof. No power needed. Passive cooling. No wind? solar powered motors are available for hvac applications. Mount the motor between the 2 blowers. The future is now.

I believe that you are mistaken about the power draw from your AC unit. The tag you were looking at was the information about the plug configuration. For 110v AC the plug commonly used is a 15amp plug. That is a standard specification. I have a modest system. I have an 5000 - 8000 BTU Air Conditioning unit. And it draws about 500W or 1kw on startup. I doubt your air conditioner pulls 1800+ watts. I would suggest taking your air unit, plug it into a kill-o-watt meter and then tell us it's actual draw so we can come up with the appropriate figures.

buy a petro fuel generator, its a cabin... if you spend lots of time there, then you need an expert to figure this out because i have never seen an 8k btu ac pull 15 amps? Are you sure this is not max compressor amount, this is not a true amount and a capacitor or hard start kit, (same thing) could that that hard cold cranking amps way down? this is very old but i still found it in my searchs.. good luck