"Derek Broughton" wrote in message
...
Paul wrote:

Kinda depends on how much arms and legs go for in your neck of the woods.
I've a Sequence pump that uses about 120 watts. A 400 watt inverter ($30)
would easily run it. Car battery, maybe $75 or so. Now here's where the
body parts come in. On ebay, 123 watt solar panels go for $660 each and
I'd need two of them, figuring that the sun only shines 1/2 the time,

The sun doesn't shine 1/2 the time. You'd be hard-pressed to find
anywhere
in North America where the sun shines on average 7 hours per day (in
summer - I assume we don't need to worry about winter).

but
the pump runs 24/7. Maybe 3 would be better to allow for cloudy days and
system losses.

otoh, three 123W panels is pretty close to my back of the envelope
calculation :-)

I can get them for much less than $660, but they'll cost at least that by
the time shipping is calculated. They're big and bulky, and they only
ship
FedEx or UPS Ground in most cases.

Throw in a charging regulator,

actually, they're available under $50

and we're in the 2
kilo-dollar neighborhood. That's more than arms and legs go for around
here. It doesn't sound feasible for anything larger than say a whiskey
barrel size water feature.
Paul

--
derek


Actually, my whole point here was that the idea of powering a pond pump with
PV cells would be cost prohibitive for all but the _money is no object_
ponder.
Paul