Analyzing the electrical

Analyzing the electrical needs has been an interesting challenge. To run one incubator and one brooder we will need to supply 105 watts of power constantly. At 12 volts, that is 8.75 Amps which equals 4410 Amp hours over a 21 day cycle of incubation. A typical car battery is about 50 Amp hours, and if we can get our hands on deep cycle batteries they will be around 100 Amp hours. For starters I am going to budget for a bank of 10 batteries in parallel with a 60 watt solar panel charging them. If we can average 8 hours of sunlight per day we will recuperate 600 Amp hours during the incubation cycle. That still leaves us with 3800 Amp hours to account for. The battery bank fully charged will account for another 500 amp hours bringing the total down to 3300 amp hours. Divided by 21 days we need to account for another 157 amp hours daily which is essentially charging 3 of the batteries and rotating them out. By doubling the solar output we can subtract another 600 amp hours from our total and probably get by with charging 2 batteries a day from the grid. Grid electric averages about 4 hours per day, so if we can use a 20 amp charger on 2 or 3 batteries we will generate about 80 amp hours daily or 1680 amp hours for the 21 day cycle. Charging is not linear so in reality we will be generating less amp hours. The solution would seem to be to have a charger for each battery rather than one charger charging them in parallel. So three chargers on three batteries that rotate daily should do the trick. 10-15 amp chargers will improve battery life, and are relatively cheap. If we add 3 batteries to the total instead of rotating 3 of the 10, we will be able to get a fuller charge by rotating every other day and getting a full 8-10 hours of charge time on the batteries. For the initial budget I'm going to have 15 batteries. 12 in use and 3 on charge at all times. This will simplify the rotation process. I calculate 12 50Ah batteries to give us a about 3 days with no solar input, and 5 days with 8 hours of sunlight per day average. If we incubate once per month we will have an extra week each month to bring all the batteries up to full charge before starting the next cycle. This would hatch us about 35 chicks per month which is about half of our long term goal. Depending on the real world reality of the system we will expand it after the first year if we are ready to step up production. Ideally we will get our hands on some high capacity deep cycle batteries and double the capacity of the system, but until I get accurate information and pricing I'm going to assume that we will be picking up random car batteries wherever we can find them in country.