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Andy
Hey guys, it’s Andy here. And today we’re just doing a quick episode on basically the maths behind running your home systems and your grows on a inverter. We talk a little bit about lead acid batteries, lithium batteries, all the different types of batteries, the types of inverters, we don’t go into very, very technical details. So it’s easy enough for everyone to follow along. And hopefully this will help you at home setting up your backup system for your grow or for whatever you will need to run through loadshedding or rolling blackout. Let’s get into it. Dean, you’ve obviously had some personal experience with the growing during load shedding and batteries and inverters specifically,

Dean
yeah, it’s become, it’s gotten so bad that it’s actually to a point now that it’s kind of impossible to run a successful grow without some kind of backup, you know, small backups work, but a lot of guys are now having to really look at upscaling their investment into sort of battery and inverter side of things. So yeah, it’s a super important talking point, especially for our South African growers, because it’s not going away anytime soon. And it really does add to the barrier to entry of getting into, you know, into indoor growing, you have to have a backup, you have to know what you’re doing. You’re having ageing, you know, batteries don’t last forever. So that’s another point as well. Once again, a super important topic with relation to being a South African South African grower.

Andy
Yeah, it’s a it’s unfortunate, and, but something we all have to deal with. So today, I just want to put some context in this, obviously, the I’ve got a little presentation, I’m going to show you guys in a second. But with regards to this, it’s not an exact science at this level, you know, you’d have to reach out to either us or we can put you in contact with someone who can set you up with a proper system if you are at home. Or you can try figure out the math for yourself. So generally, I’ve geared these calculations for a maybe four or five plant grow with like a power consumption of like 500 watts at its peak. And that kind of means you can get a commercially like a retail available inverter and a retail and available light and battery charger and things like that, as opposed to where you can get these like commercial size systems where it becomes like a whole different ballpark. And then also to add some more context to that there’s different things that go into it, like for instance batteries that you choose. I mean, this is like a massive topic that is pretty detailed. But in general, you get things like lead acid, those like big batteries that you’d like kind of look like the size and shape that you would see in your car. Those are going to be so heavy, and they don’t last as long and they but however they cheap. Whereas you also get now lithium batteries that are used as like inverters that are used for inverter systems is the same type of huge guys getting your cell phones and they are way more expensive but lasts longer. And you get more cycles out of them in a cycle is just like charge two flat two charge because then you What are you running at the moment you’ve got a gel batteries, I think

Dean
now I’m running late acids. My infrastructure is a deep cycle. Yes. Yeah, so I’ve got a system running to I have a 24 volt inverter, 1440 watt inverter 24 volts, I’m running to our lead acids. And then for the energy wise grow, which I’m also busy with at the moment, I have a nother inverter, which is a 720 volt white, and that’s a 12 volt and I’m running a single a single battery on that. However, might my infrastructure is ageing a bit, you know, the lead acids are rated for around two years. And even though I’ve used mine incredibly, incredibly conservatively over the two year period, I’ve never run more than 303 100 watts or so on my on my bigger system. They’re 1.6 years old now and they are now especially after the sort of heavy stage six load shedding, they’re starting to lose quite a bit of their efficiency. So I’m kind of in line to get some new ones soon. But I’m gonna kind of stretch it out and I’m personally saving up for a bigger system just to sort of put my house on it and then to obviously have more sort of consistency in the Grow power more stuff. So yeah, my next upgrade will probably be a proper commercial system. But up until now it’s really it’s really worked to to sort of mitigate some effects I’m not getting the results I really want you know, but I’m not getting hermy and pliers are staying in flour so it’s definitely working for me for me currently.

Andy
Something nice that you mentioned earlier is the another thing with regards to the batteries and the type of batteries and if you guys want to see the calculations you can also jump forward a bit but just you know we want to give you as much context but there is something you also need to factor in now that as loadshedding is getting worse is with regards to the battery charge time. And the battery charge time means that essentially you need to charge that thing up before the next round of load shedding hits. And at times, you know, if they’re, you’re getting hit three times in a day, and you’re maybe drawing your battery down 70 80%, you know, that maybe means that you’re not going to charge it up as quick lead acid and gel batteries don’t charge as quick as the lithium. So lithium has got those like supercharged capabilities, where you might be able to get it up to like 90% within an hour, depending on the size of the battery and the capacity of the battery charger. But yeah, there’s also factors that that weigh in. And I think maybe the market is probably going to move towards these lithium batteries soon because of just like how quickly they need to get them charged. And I think obviously, because of the demand, the price is coming down of lithium, but I think during COVID There was like a lithium salt shortage globally. So the prices went up. And yeah, the chip shortages and stuff like that, whereas the lead is it’s very, like standard. But yeah, important. Super, super important to factor in. Dean any other overarching things that that I may have missed that we just want to factor in in portion, size of the battery rating

Dean
of the inverter doesn’t if your inverters rated at 1400 Watts, it doesn’t mean you can go and put 1400 Watts onto it. So like, okay, that mathematics now, but don’t look at when you’re if you are doing some home shopping and you’re wanting to get a small system, you know, if you go for like that the one of the most popular ones online is that me so 720 Watt inverters, you know, all over the place, but you can’t that doesn’t instantly mean you can go and plug seven watts on it, you know, this is the inverter is basically the tool that charges and flips over when the power cuts. But the thing here that is most important is your is your battery. So you know the when you’re getting into it, and you don’t really know much about the different kinds of things, you’ll say, okay, cool, you know, our 720 Watts, I can run my whole grand there’s, but you’d need to account for the need to account for how much battery backup that you that you have on it to see how much you can how much you can draw. And that’s where the math obviously does, does come in. And you know, a lot of the time, what guys do is they don’t actually aim to power their whole grow on a smaller system, you know, the more commercial systems that are going to cost you 50k Plus guys are aiming to power their whole growth. But that’s obviously a massive barrier to entry. On the smaller systems, you’re probably going to be aiming to power some light and some environmental. So like maybe your extractor fan, as well as a backup light rather than powering you know, your whole your normal 700 white light or whatever you’re running in your in your tent. So it’s more of like building up a backup system over running your system on a on a backup.

Andy
Yeah, no 100% I think as well one last thing that before we jump into the math, also the diehards, you know will be there for the math, and I don’t want to scare everyone off with it is just with the with the with the battery inverter system is a battery, there’s three parts of the battery, the inverter, and then the battery charger. And what’s nice when dimensioned those Mesa inverters like this was like a sort of a revelation to me as like they come with a switch. But then. So that means as soon as the battery is, as soon as the power is cut, that battery is going to that’s going to switch, the inverter is going to switch automatically from battery from wall power to battery power. And like that even happens, you know, we could have loadshedding now and it’s just everything carries on it’s I think there’s, you get speed of the switch point something milliseconds, and a good switch will be able to do it in fewer milliseconds, like the hospital’s got to be really quick goes off. And then the batteries kick in within a few seconds. Within a few milliseconds. The lights don’t even you maybe see a flicker. So yeah, that’s that’s I think the general concept of getting into the battery loadshedding backup solution, unfortunately, I wish it was easier. But it’s it’s quite a bit complicated. Okay, so having a look at some of these. There’s math, yep, you guys will have access to this, you can make a copy. And then once you have a copy, you can play around with that. But yeah, the idea is not really to I’m not going to do hundreds of different calculations, I just want to draw attention to inverter size, which is basically we’ve got a 720 watt inverter, that doesn’t mean you can use the 720 Watts you always want to try aim for like, I wouldn’t even try push it to 75% of this, you know, I’d say 500 would be the max because the watts on a on items isn’t always just like a flatline, you know, like a kettle is going to go like this. And then it’s going to spike and then I’ll go down and it’ll spike again. So you know, things change. And that means Yeah, your watch isn’t always going to be stationary and you don’t want to be pushing the inverters over because then you can blow fuses and things like that. battery voltage, just check that out and whatever battery you are buying and have Yeah, we had a little calculation ready, but I’m just going to leave that for now. I was working with the OS. So there’s two parts to this. There is amp hour and and time. So amp hours how you measure your battery capacity, pretty much every battery, you’ll see is going to have a amp hour rating on it. And that’s kind of there’s other ways to measure its its capacity, but I think Amp Hours becoming the standard. And if you want to work out how much amp hours you need, you need to know your watts, you obviously need to get a some sort of a power metre they available everywhere these days, you just plug it into your wall and you plug in your appliance, you can see how much your draw is coming into that. So let’s say in this example, we’ve got 150 Watt draw, there’s not a lot is probably enough for maybe a light and a fan, a small light and a fan. And yeah, not not a terrible amount. I think the dean, what do you rate a light fan, like the basic essentials,

Dean
if like this, most of these systems is gonna be for like a one by one or a 1.2 metre. You know, so you’re running a probably 100 and 100 to 150 word in 102 150 More inline fan to there you looking at for your extraction system, you’re looking at about 8080 watts or so. So with 150 You are calculation, you could give yourself your extractor fan at 80 Watts, and then you’d have 70 watts of light left over which is pretty, pretty decent, you know, so light and or you could go for less a light on his it’s ending with a decent spread area. And then you could do your extractor fan, one small oscillating fan, most of those oscillating fans are small clip on ones are around 35 watts. And then you can obviously your bed still have an additional round 35 Watts to add to to add to light it that’s kind of the most important things to run. But I must say the light is important. But by nearly by far the most important thing is making sure that your extractor fan does store run during load shedding. I’ve ran some tests and your humidity on a two hour period on a Grow Tent hits 100%, nearly it’s 90 something percent. So you’re getting massive swings in the load shedding period. And then that obviously brings powdery mildew galore. So that’s one of the most important things is accounting for your extract to extract a system to keep running

Andy
and present. So yeah, let’s see. I mean, you guys could get gear this up. And you could you know, you could do the math and say cool, I want to run 250 or whatnot, or in this case, I’m gonna leave it 150 For simplicity’s sake. So our time that’s generally two and a half hours, which is the standard loadshedding or power power outages. And what is the draw, we’ve got a 12 volt battery, if you guys are running things in series in parallel, just take note of this. But for the most part, they are the 12 volt batteries coming standard. And this is the one thing that that I haven’t spoken about yet. Well, we briefly touched on quality efficiency was what the E stands for. I don’t know if that’s the right word. But essentially, you don’t want to you don’t want to use 100% of your battery, these, these deep cycle lead acid gel batteries, the lithium, lithium separate. But these big lead acids, they don’t like to be charged all the way down to North because it’s a chemical reaction. And when all the chemicals be reacted, it’s hard to unreacted when you charge them and your there is loss in life. And like Dean was saying the batteries don’t last forever, lithium is lost a little bit longer. And I think if you were running a lithium, I would be much more comfortable to bring it down to maybe let’s say you want to you can draw up to 70% of the battery, that would also be fine. Yeah, so you could you could change that on the fly. But we don’t want to use more than half. In this case, for our setup, just we want to preserve the life of the lead acid batteries. So running the math, two and a half hours times 150 Watts, 375 12 volts times your your efficiency. And I mean, you could do the math however you want, but you’re going to need a 62.5 amp hour battery. This means if you’re just running 150 Watts, that you are only going to need to do only going to use half of this. So you should have 50% capacity, bear in mind six to 12 to 18 months later, this is not going to be the case, you’re probably going to have a 60 You’re still going to have let’s say 62.5 amp hour battery, but you’re most certainly not going to be drawing just half you’ll be probably at about 18 months, you’re gonna be drawing nearly everything on that.

Dean
Yeah, and another point on that. A lot of inverters come built in with standard kind of redundancy. So like for this specific inverter we’re talking about which would be that sort of 720 Watt metre it will cut it will shut off at 30% capacity on the batteries. So that’s 62.5% that’s 63.5 amp hour would technically be 100 amp hour battery on the inverter because you only have availability of 70 amp hours from 100 amp hour battery, and then also you’re dealing with your with your ageing, your rapid ageing, which is another which is another issue. So there are some redundancies at play, but you need to play even further on top of those redundancies, because we have, you know, it’s not a power cut every now and then we’re dealing with sort of rolling blackouts every single day couple of times a

Andy
day. And I mean, it’s yeah, if there’s places where there’s longer, you know, countries watching there, where there’s longer loadshedding period, you know, blackouts, it’s important to factor those in, because that your lifespan of your battery is just going to get worse and worse, and then you’re expecting 105 amp hours or whatever, and you’re actually only getting 80%. You know, you’ve got to be aware of these things. And that is why, you know, we tend not to get too involved with these calculations, if the clients come in, we can give the general advice and consultation, but you’re gonna have you know, there’s so many factors to this, that you have to do that you have to calibrate and work in. So inversely, I’ve taken the same formula flipped it around a bit, and you can just work out how you know how long you’re gonna last because we have two and a half hours. So like, most people kind of go, Okay, this is my load. My consumption and I’ve got this, you know, I’ve got a said battery, how long is it going to last me and they will kind of want to just make sure it’s gonna last two and a half hours. Also not factoring any. Also factoring in quarter discharge? Yeah, but let’s say it’s the same efficiency that I was talking about earlier. You only want to discharge 50% of the light, this case, withdrawing 100 watts. So therefore, we’re going to last 3.75 hours on on the 62.5, amp hour battery running to 50% dropped off. That’s basically that’s kind of essentially it. There’s obviously all those other factors that you guys can work in, feel free to grab the sheet and play around with it. Yes, yeah.

Dean
I also think most lithium ions are standard 24 volt batch batteries, I don’t think you get them in in 12 volts. That’s another thing to consider if you are going for the are going for lithium ion, which is definitely the advised, the cost is far more, but you’re looking at a five, I think it’s a five year lifespan versus like a two year lifespan, which then it does, and quicker charges lighter battery, you know, it’s definitely the way to go. But if you’re in a pickle right now, and you can add, you have little to draw, then the lead acid or the or the gel does just does make sense. But they are super, super, super heavy. Like I picked up a gel battery for the first time the other day. And it’s like, even heavier than lead acids, like nearly put my back out picking it out. So there’s, there’s so many factors that play. But I think these think this kind of knowledge, like lighting knowledge for a grower, you know, knowledge for growers is imperative in, in South Africa, you have to have some understanding of how to backup your system. Because I mean, you know, if we’re chatting to people these days, and people are asking us questions, you know, how do I get in how or what I need and stuff like that. We’re basically telling people not even to waste their time, unless they unless they’re priced in a backup system that goes You can’t you it’s basically impossible to do it without a without a backup system these days, unfortunately, especially if we’re going to be sitting in stage four, or five, six blackouts in South Africa. And like on stage six blackout, you’re getting sort of nearly 12 hours of darkness a day, eight to 12 hours, which is, you know, true. It’s ridiculous.

Andy
No 100% It’s, it’s something you guys have to factor in. It’s something that we all have to consider. And like you said, it’s the science here today is is like, you know, was was lighting for instance, there’s so many things that, you know, go beyond the obvious, you know, we don’t just look at lights with just the Watts and things like that, you got to look at the efficiency, efficiency, the power readings, the, you know, how long are they going to last the degradation. So that same things applies to your backup systems and your nutrients and your feeding and your IPM schedule, they you know, you can get quite technical on it. So this is just a simplified version. Hopefully it’ll help some of you guys out there. And I think that is about it for us today. Thanks always for watching and for supporting the show and we’ll look forward to seeing you guys in another episode. These guys. These guys