choffee

I have a couple of electrical powered devices at the allotment. A small water pump and a mole scarer. They are both pretty basic. The pump is just to water things when I don't get down there every day. It sort of works but the pump itself seem quite weak so I need to balance the pipes quite well. The mole scarer is battery powered and seems to eat them pretty quickly and I'm not sure the moles are that scared of it now. I've also been thinking about monitoring things like ground temp and shipping that data via lora.

So more for my own entertainment than anything I have been thinking about adding a sort of solar battery to the allotment. I keep looking at what might work but have never really got to the point of calculating anything. It looks like a decent MPTT charger and battery and panel would not be that expensive (relatively, of course this is a hobby not really a cheap food replacement :) So I think I still have some questions about the winter. First how will the batteries survive the cold weather? Second is there any real solar in the winter? I suppose it would be a fun experiment to see how this works. Set up a small system and the monitor what is going on. So maybe a charger/batter manager with an output would be good. Then I can log things like the solar output each day over the winter. On the plus side there should be less demand over the winter as I don't need to water things and the moles are less active.

So next steps would be looking at monitoring and then deciding on capacity. Look at some solar energy reports for my area? Maybe setup a really small solar panel that I can just power a lora sensor with?