Electrical systems

The Wallaby's Rock Garden is all off grid.

Currently this is purely using solar power. There are multiple small, redundant systems of about 500W each. The systems are running at a mixture of voltages but mainly 12V DC. A variety of energy storage technologies are in use, from Glass mat batteries, LiFePO and initial experiments in pumped water, compression and fuel cell storage.

Inverters can convert to normal 240V AC for many appliances. It is more efficient to use electricity directly in DC to save transformation losses. This is helped by using 12V LED lighting and efficient BUCK DC-DC stepdowns.

At times a Generator is borrowed, mainly for powertools.

Water systems, eg pumps are also on their own self contained solar running pure DC 12v.

Similar for electric fences. As these become more complete and intelligent they will be incorporated into the rotational grazing system. With pumps filling animal water troughs and the appropriate electric fences activated for the right section.

Later plans include:

• microcontrollers (raspberry pi and arduino) for intelligent load use.
• Capacitors for high load equipment (eg fridge)
• Wind generation (especially thinking vertical axis for higher resilience in high winds)
• Networking the various independent power systems
• Hydrogen fuel cells