is it possible on a outdoor layout to compleatly power the layout with solar panals so you dont have to pay the power company for using your trains?
honestly for that matter couldnt i make scale windmills off of some old motors and wire them up?
cause if you take an electric motor and spin the rod in the middle it will instead of taking power do the opposite and generate power.
so if i take a motor maybe G scale size turn it into a wind mill why couldnt i wire it up to help power my train?
open to ideas and concepts if anyone has suggestions
Two questions:
- how much money ( ROI return on your investment) will be spent on either solar or wind?
- how much useable electrical energy will be produced from the “free source of energy”?
- Comment: So many times an idea that is not impossible, turns out to be impractical. The idea of a perpetual motion device: i.e water fall turns waterwheel that generates current for a pump that lifts water for repeat activity. Sounds good and indeed might work for a while. In the real world this is impossible without end. Cause = heat loss. The system has two items that will “warm” during normal operation. generator/pump. With this energy being created during the operation, there is no way to “recover” it and keep that energy inside the system. The less the loss, the longer it works. Think of a car. Your car engine has to have cooling, no radiator and overheating occurs. So much of the energy (gasoline = BTU’s = ability to do work) is wasted by having the radiator “get rid of it” (only in the winter is this heat useful) The % efficency of the auto engine is NO Where 100%. Lots of Heat Energy loss. We don’t care because the car gets us downtown. However when projects to be considered are examined, lots of questions need be answered. Especially when on small scale as you are considering.
- Advise: buy SOME of what you propose and check out the practicality by observing what happens on a small scale. It works, for a while. The best to your endeavors. endmrw0308251308
What type of outdoor layout? What guage?
im laying out an o guage atm
over 1 acre long is the plan
To power this with solar or wind, also need to consider energy storage. All of this, as MP104 said, is possible, but is it worth the cost? If you are looking to do this, I’d snoop around on yachting and R/V sites to see what those folks use to power their appliances when unplugged from the grid.
You might have more fun seeing what you can power with inexpensive hobby and garden stuff. There was a YouTube video of some dude that put solar panels on a flat car and used that to power a PIKO 25 tonner, for instance, and many people, myself included, have used cheap solar powered garden lights for buildings. The more ambitious use the panels to power windmills and the like.
Eric
You can do ANYTHING, if you can find a way to make it work.
Keep experimenting , and you’ll find a way.
Paul
I suspect someone in the dead-rail community has already developed a way to do this.
My own preference would be to put panels and a battery on the house, and then tap the panels through a separate circuit to an appropriate battery to run the trains. That battery regulated by a charger also capable of using grid power if aggregate solar output is at any time incapable of producing at least 20% charge state.
You can figure out the size battery needed by using an ammeter to determine the running current, and extrapolating to the time you want the trains to be running over the course of a 24-hour day.
If you have money to throw at making the operation ‘fully running on renewables’, you could ‘re-engine’ the garden-railway locomotives with relatively low-power-consumption motors, or install relatively large keep-alive storage.
I doubt you’ll get much usable power from a homemade wind-turbine setup, but there certainly have been cheap designs for doing it, some of which involve using high-strength permanent magnets on a motor rotor. I recall this approach being used in the old Whole Earth Catalogue, before the era of NIB or easily-sourced hard-drive magnets…