Thoughts on a solar powered pump?

Jump to latest Follow Reply
E

eline65

0
Feb 12, 2011
30
Mesa, AZ
Hi all, I have a question. I see lots of good info on pumping at low speed, and how it's filtered better and more efficiant. seeing how this needs less power, and I live in the valley of the sun (Phoenix, AZ) what's the consensus on a solar powered filtering pump, and maybe a booster just for cleaning?

Has anyone tried this?

I'm not going to jump on a green bandwagon, but it might be worth planning for a major upgrade in the future. I think putting that 300+ days of sunshine we have here to use would be a great idea.
 
Rather than directly using a solar panel to power a pump you might consider putting in a grid connect whole of house photovoltaic system to generate most or all of your power.
I think that in some states in the US there are some fairly generous subsidies on the installation of a PV system.
You would need to do a careful analysis of the time it would take to recover your return on investment based on your current annual power spend plus increases in power rates in the next few years.
With the subsidies in place here for installation and a fairly generous tariff paid to the customer for every unit they export onto the grid, at the moment there is a frenzy of pv installations here. Whilst it might not be so financially attractive over there as here at the moment, it might be worth looking into as I suspect that power costs will increase quite considerably across the world in the next few years; they reckon by 100% in the next 5 years here.
 
I would be interested in finding some info on those solar pumps as well. I have a client desperately looking to change over to a solar pump. Figure I'd just point him in the right direction and he can buy and install it. I'm interested to see if a solar pump could work out. I've been recommending the Hayward EcoStar lately as it saves quite a bit of electricty.
 
A whole house system ROI is something around 5-7 years w/ subsidies, around 10 w/o. I have a municipal electric utility so they don't have a time-of use plan, or efficient pump rebates that I know of.

I did find a DC pump but you need 4-6 panels to run it, plus the batteries and controls/plumbing,valves, etc.

My thinking was a project over the next few years. It takes me $30-$50/mo to run the pump in the winter. I just moved into the house and I'm learning. will probably $50-$75/mo in the summer. So I'm betting the ROI would be 3-4 years. Still to much outlay for my broke derrière right now, but I want to learn what options are out there. But I tend to agree it might not be worth the pennies saved. I'm wondering what reliability concerns there are, or extra "gotchas" that might be lurking so I wanted to ask the experienced folks for their thoughts..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Thread Status
Hello , This thread has been inactive for over 60 days. New postings here are unlikely to be seen or responded to by other members. For better visibility, consider Starting A New Thread.
Top Bottom
Back
Jump to latest Follow Reply