More good ideas Cecil, I'll have to look into those types of tanks around here.
Now back to the freak show...
Here are a few pictures of some of the solar setup.
This one is the panels, the front three are for electricity, ie this is the power for the batteries, air pumps and lights. The back four are for heat, I expect to add four more panels into the system later this year, and during the cold, miserable part of the winter, there may be even more panels than that!!
This is a picture of the charge controller refilling the batteries after a night of draining due to electric loads.
After the batteries are full, you should see something like this.
All this means is that the batteries are full and system is not using much power. If I turned something "on" as a load, the charge controller would output the needed power if available.
Finally, here is a picture of the temporary setup. It shows the battery box, the load sensing Wizbang Jr on the deltec bus bar, the charge controller, and a sine wave inverter. With this setup, we have 230 Amp-hours of DC power at 24 volts. and we can make up to 1500 watts of 120V AC as needed. The current set of solar panels can produce around 700 watts of power in full sun. Of course, we can add more panels to generate more power if needed.
