this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Using solar power station for home office/ lab (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by root@lemmy.world to c/solardiy@lemmy.world
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My office/ lab at home uses around 600W when fully running, and I see that there are quite a few power stations that will comfortably handle that, and foldable 4 panel setups that can generate 300-400W.

Would there be any issues plugging a UPS (my lab has a few of them) into a solar power station such as this?

Is there some sort of feature I want to look for such as sin wave, etc to have this work reliably, or does a UPS not really care since the controller in the power station should be normalizing voltage, etc?

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[–] aodhsishaj@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

If you want something expandable and built for this requirement ou of the box you should look at something like a Jackery, or EcoFlow Delta or the like. Expect to pay about 1200 for everything all included.

However you could build your own system for much less. As @ramble81@lemm.ee said you don't want to use a traditional UPS without a power inverter and that'll rob a lot of efficiency.

You would obviously scale this down but here is a pretty good how to that should give you plenty of terms and concepts to research.

https://theperfectadventure.com/diy-power-station-instructions/

[–] root@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Gotcha, thanks so much for the reply. I was looking at EcoFlow options and the price range is also in the range I was looking at (a bit more with panels most likely). The EcoFlow options provide AC out right, so I would still need an inverter before plugging a UPS into it? Glad I asked.

[–] ramble81@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Calculate your ROI first, but beyond that you don’t really want to plug a UPS into what is essentially another UPS. Quite a few units are sensitive to normalized sine waves and will constantly go on battery which negates what you're looking for.

[–] ScottE@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It's fine, I have several UPSs on a critical loads panel that I'll run off an Ecoflow during extended power outages. And just for the heck of it, I've run my big office UPS directly off the EcoFlow all day. As I have rooftop solar this doesn't provide any daily benefit aside from backup, but it's perfectly fine to do so. It doesn't provide any economic benefit, most likely, though.

I would definitely use only a pure sine wave inverter. Fortunately these days it's mostly the norm.