petitefrancaise

In an effort to occupy my son and prevent him blowing all the electrics in the house again I'm thinking of doing a few solar energy projects with him...

first off is the swimming pool pump. At the moment we have a single speed motor on it which uses loads of electricity and is pretty noisy. I looked into just hooking that up to a solar panel but would need an inverter for the AC motor and it's still a power hungry motor....so, next up was a variable speed motor which uses DC and this can be hooked up to the solar panels fairly easily.

Anyone done anything like this? I'm thinking it should be fairly easy, not too expensive (since I want to replace the motor for the pump anyway).

Rickyk

Will not be cheap depending on the pump size A 2kw pump would not be unusual. To change this to solar will be at least $3000 (2kw 24vDC motor and 2kw of panels)
Probably better to go with a smaller pump and motor running through daylight hours.
A place we rented in the Bahamas one vacation had a solar pump to the pool. I think they were paying 30c/kwh so it would make sense

petitefrancaise

They are actually gaining in popularity.
I can buy a variable speed pool pump for $600 (which draws 1/8 of the power of my current 1HP pump). I can expect the pump to draw 150 ish watts.
The pump mentioned above is also energystar rated and so I can get a 30% tax credit...

It's not really a question of whether it is financially viable (it is, payback for the pump is 1 year in reduced energy cost if I am not using solar) but I'm just wondering if anyone else has had a go at this.

Rickyk

I looked at doing a solar pump for the water feature in my Koi pond but the flows I needed were to much for any reasonably priced solar system.

petitefrancaise

I haven't priced it all up yet but just switching to a variable speed pump will reduce my costs enough for me to think seriously about it.

What pump do you have for your koi pond?

I found a better example but it's on my pc at home so I'll take a look later.

Rickyk

I use a Tidal Wave A315 (12 amps 230V) pumps around 140 GPM with 35ft of head. Runs 12 hours a day except when it is very cold I run 24/7 to prevent freeze up.

petitefrancaise

OMG your pump uses about the same watts as my current pool pump! How big is your pond? My pool is 26K gallons and I run it about 6-8 hours in the summer which is more than one complete water filtration cycle. Switching to the variable speed one will mean running it for about 10 hours for a full filtration cycle but at 1/8 the consumption of current electricity.

Rickyk

I would estimate the pond is around 100K gallons. The pump supplies a waterfall feature but also filters and aerates the pond. Not sure how much it is needed for the health of the pond but the fish are thriving so I don't want to change much.