Solar Wireless Bridge 2 camera recommendations

[biggen]

The BMS in my LiFePO4 batteries will only let the charge level go down to 20%. I don't know if this is common or not. Additionally, the charging slows down a lot when the charge level goes over 90%. With my BMS, a 100Ah battery has a real life usable capacity of about 750Ah.

My 4000 watts of panels produced 203 kWh this past January. Scaled to a 100 watt panel the production would have been 5.057 kWh, about half of your estimate. Of course a lot depends on location, mine being in a mid-sunny part of Oregon, not the gloomy coast or Willamette Valley. Over 15 years, the lowest January production was 118 kWh, and the highest 306 kWh, so there's a lot of weather dependency. In some years, December was lower than January, but still within the 118-306 bounds.

Yeah, I was giving theoretically numbers for 100% discharge. No one is doing that because the voltage level would drop below what the equipment needs to run before the battery even reaches 100% discharge. Or, as you say, the software in batteries themselves won't even let you go that low before they turn them off. I think you meant 75Ah useable and not 750Ah for a 100Ah battery.

I'm located in Florida so I'm going to get a ton more sun than you. Plugging in a random Oregon zip code (Eugene) to Pvwatts, that shows a 100w panel will produce 5kWh for the month of December which tracks with your numbers. I get double the amount of irradiance at my latitude and weather than you do.

 

[ron351]

The BMS in my LiFePO4 batteries will only let the charge level go down to 20%. I don't know if this is common or not. Additionally, the charging slows down a lot when the charge level goes over 90%. With my BMS, a 100Ah battery has a real life usable capacity of about 750Ah.


What is a 100Ah panel?


My 4000 watts of panels produced 203 kWh this past January. Scaled to a 100 watt panel the production would have been 5.057 kWh, about half of your estimate. Of course a lot depends on location, mine being in a mid-sunny part of Oregon, not the gloomy coast or Willamette Valley. Over 15 years, the lowest January production was 118 kWh, and the highest 306 kWh, so there's a lot of weather dependency. In some years, December was lower than January, but still within the 118-306 bounds.

Guess I meant 100 watt panel. not 100Ah panel.

 

[lewic]

From my experience here is what I did and used....

2 x 100 watt solar panels (Must point them south) - Can wire in parallel or serial depending on solar charge controller. If wiring panel in parallel then you would need branch connectors which is just a "Y" adapter.
Solar charge controller - a basic 20 amp MPPT would be best for simple setups. A higher amperage unit would support more panels.
Battery - I used a 100 ah LifePO4 12V battery
Hikvision PtP antenna - This antenna runs off native 12 volts. No need to get a boost converter to up the voltage from the battery's 12 volt up to a 24v which is what the Ubiquiti Airmax antennas use.
Switch - For connecting multiple cameras to the PtP antenna. I used a Hikvision POE switch BUT I am powering it with 12 volts. Note that it would not output POE as I am only powering it with 12 volts but it will pass data fine. I used this switch as it supports higher temps. I used a Netgear before and it died pretty quickly inside the NEMA enclosure due to heat.
Busbar - For sending power to all the devices

My setup I did not want to deal with POE power. Doing so means I would need a boost converter to up the voltage which there are conversion losses meaning my battery won't be able to last as long powering the devices than if I didn't need to convert power. This means I just need more cables. So to each camera, switch and to the PtP antenna I will have a two conductor cable for power and a network cable for data.

Power side:
Solar Panel -> Solar Charge Controller -> Battery -> Busbar -> Cameras, Switch, PtP Antennas

Network side:
Switch -> Cameras, PtP antenna