You're missing that the accumulators drain only when daylight's gotten weak enough that the panels can't supply the load any more, with eight panels for 300kW sunset and sunrise are effectively 300/480 = 5/8 as long, so daylight is _enough_ for all but 93.75 sec, 93.75*300k is 2.8125e7, leaving 1.875MJ to spare in the accumulators.Trebor wrote: ↑Tue Feb 12, 2019 12:35 am By actually building it, it looks like you are right 6 accumulators are enough. This make me wonder what is wrong with my math. The radar uses 300k, one solar panel produces 60k so 5 solar panels are needed for day time use with nothing left over to charge accumulators for night time. For night power we need accumulators and extra solar panels. Accumulators can supply 300k for 17 seconds (or as measured 16.66666), so the question is how many 17 seconds are in the sunset + night + sunrise interval? Since sunset and sunrise have partial light I've treated them as half full day and half full night (a simplification I've seen several places). These are the numbers I've used:
- Day 208.33
- Sunset 83.33
- Night 41.66
- Sunrise 83.33
- Total 416.65
- Solar available 291.66
- No solar power 124.99
- Total 416.65