Topic: Solar powered mining only during sunlight and without batteries - page 2. (Read 3544 times)

Tottaly possible in place with high sunlight % but, some of those place aren't good for that, like Saara desert which people need to spend everyday to clean sand and dust from the equipments.

It is possible but your device will keep going off and on and this could damage something, if your solar panel is 1000watt capable then taking 200 watt power from the 1000watt panel will be ease, there are still enough juice left so even of the buffer isn't balance, as far as it doesn't go below 250 watt your device will keep running nonstop, still, I recommend using at least two battery backup, the buffer will be more stable with battery backup.

Sunlight mining is a good decision but it remains to be seen whether the mining process is completed properly through sunlight. The more light that shines on the solar panel, the more electricity the solar panel will be able to produce. A place should be selected that receives a lot of sunlight for most of the day. But many times it can be seen that when the weather is interrupted by rain, the sunlight does not reflect on the solar panel as a result of which much less electricity is produced than the demand.

Again, many people may have the opinion of storing electricity through batteries. Storing electricity through batteries will not be of much use. Because the amount of voltage that can be obtained directly from the electric line is not possible to obtain the same amount of voltage by collecting electricity through the battery. 

So if you plan to do mining with the help of solar, it is a matter of seeing how successful it is.

I'm sure it will not work because to do bitcoin mining tools require a great power,
but if the battery has a large capacity

I would imagine  it would make the miner unreliable at these times.
One minute there might be enough power, the next minute there wouldn't be.
The miner might switch on then off, possibly switch on, then not have enough power to complete the boot and remain in some locked state.
Ideally, you only want to switch on electronic equipment when you have enough power.
Solar panels are expensive.
Have you considered a used veg oil diesel system.

I agree , but I would like to comment that a simple charge controller does not do anything than cutting the voltage exceeding the battery's characteristics.

A simple charge controller cuts the voltage when exceeds the 13.8V (for silicone types ) and 14.2V (for Pb types).
There is nothing else it can do. It makes nothing more than what a solar panel could do directly connected to the battery (except from protecting it from overvoltage).

There is also the case of an MPPT charge controller that , as you said, can offer an additional 30% approximate gain compared to the previous case.

But such a controller would cost more than twice than what an S1 does.

Lastly, using an S1 with current lower than what needs, would create huge HW errors. No damage can be caused IMHO.

The speculative device in question would be a perpetual motion machine, because the specifications indicate that its a device capable of producing a constant Joules/s given a dropping input Joules/s. That's the definition of over-unity. (The only exception being of course being if some of the total max load is being diverted to a battery like described).

There is no such device.  Solar powered equipment uses a battery to buffer the supply and load.  To get optimal power out of the panels you will need a charge controller between the panels and the battery.  A charge controller alters the apparent voltage of the load to match the optimal voltage of the panel (which will vary depending on current conditions).  Slapping a panel to a fixed 12V load is going to kill 30%+ of your output.  

As for what happens if you supply a device designed to use 25 Amps less than 25 Amps?  Well it depends on what undercurrent protection the device has.  If it is none then it is very likely you could damage it.  I would not recommend hooking a 25A device to a supply which can not consistently supply 25+ Amps.

As for ways to protect the miners, unless the miner can be throttled down to use less voltage the easiest undercurrent protection (to protect the device and battery) is to measure the voltage of the battery.  As the stored energy in the battery is reduced (because device is drawing more current than the charger is supplying) its voltage will decline.  When the voltage gets "too low" (which will depend on battery type and safe max discharge) the connection to the load is cut by a relay.  Once the battery voltage reaches some min "cut on" voltage the connection to the to the load is restored.  If there is no commercially available system that meets your needs, building one is a pretty simple electrical project.

Any reason you want to be off grid?   Off grid is always more expensive.  You are adding an expensive charge controller and battery to an already expensive system.

That's impossible because watts are a unit of power, not electric potential.

Power in watts is the product of voltage and current (in amps).

Dropping wattage at constant voltage means dropping current. There is no way to maintain constant wattage under these conditions unless you're supplying more current.

There's been numerous heated discussions comparing solar power and grid power.
One thing that I have never seen being discussed is using solar panels without batteries, and mining only during sunlight, and not grid tied. 

Ideally, everything would work great when there is full sunlight and the solar panels are producing electricity at full capacity.

The part that I don't know is what might happen in the morning or evening when the sun is low in the sky and the solar panels are only generating a fraction of its capacity. 

Just for argument's sake, let's say the mining rig is an Antminer S1 drawing 300-watts of power at 12VDC and two 12V 300-watt solar panels providing 600-watts of power during peak sunlight.

My question is, what will happen in the morning and evening when the solar panels are only producing, say, 100-watts of power? Will the Antminer S1 work at a much lower hash rate? Or could it be damaged due to insufficient power? What if during the day, dark clouds came rolling in and the power fluctuates between 50-watts and 400-watts?

Is there some kind of pre-built device or protection circuit that can regulate the power to at least 300-watts? I suppose a small battery can be added just to normalize fluctuations so that the regulator won't cycle the power too frequently.