Solar Powered Pumps

By Noah Stephens

A great way to put solar panels to use is to install a solar powered water pump for your well. Even though windmills have more commonly been used to power water pumps, solar panels are starting to become the preferred method for pumping water in remote locations. This is great news for so many reasons:

First of all, there are huge amounts of land that have been thought to be inhabitable because potable water was not available. Well, just imagine a solar well that taps deep down water sources in remote deserts all over our planet. Someday this could that overpopulation will not be a problem as vast amounts of new real estate becomes available for more and more people. Agricultural land may someday increase 100 fold when this actually becomes a reality.

Second, pumping water with solar panels is particularly a good use for solar panels because the energy can be saved indefinitely in the form of gravity. Solar panel systems that charge batteries can become expensive because batteries in these systems can often cost more than the solar panels themselves thus rendering the entire idea not economically sound.

Now, that I've convinced you what a great idea it is to install a solar powered water pump, let me move on to the how to. It is important to choose a good solar powered well pump for use that makes the best use of your power and doesn't require a transformer where energy is lost unnecessarily.

You don't want a regular well pump that runs on 110 volt AC power. That would mean that you would have to invest in an inverter that would eat up a lot of power and bring your well pump to a slow trickle. You want a well pump designed specifically for solar panels and that means you want a low voltage DC model water pump. Your solar panel doesn't need a high wattage rating to run your solar pump.

Some solar powered pumps operate on as little at 100 watts. Of course, the more watts, the more water you can pump so you need to find out what your requirements are before you go out shopping.

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