diy solar

diy solar

Building a solar powered way to sort/wash tons of rocks & gems

Guda

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Nov 19, 2019
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I bought my property to build a nex gen farm. To build said farm I need to plant a lot of trees. I also am putting in a "in earth" greenhouse, house & pool. All that is digging. Well, randomly I am sitting on a pile of gems. Originally I was going to build my house with rammed earth. In with the gems are endless colorful rocks. Rocks perfect for slip form house build.

I have a 310sg John Deere. So digging is covered. But the rocks are in a flood layer covered in dirt & an alkaline crust. The rocks need to be sorted & cleaned. I am going to build a series of 55gal drums into a trammel. Also needed to build a way to wash them, like a cement mixer or a bit smaller. I want to power all this with solar, hopefully.

I'd like to run it off direct pv power if possible. Just trying to mine as cheep & green as possible.

Think I'll weld 3 55gal drums end to end & have 3-4 sets of those to grade the material. Need to power rotate them. And then like I said, something like a cement mixer. A little one will work for the gems but the rocks for building are up to 3-5x the size of a basket ball. The biggest rocks wont go through the grader part, they just need to be washed.

The amounts are really quite staggering. It will take a couple/few years to dig/process this all. I like good stuff that wont break. Anyone know about powering equipment with solar?
 
I don't think your going to get a useful reply unless you can specify how many Volts and Amps the motors will use and how long they will be running each day. You need some sort of power requirement idea before you can think of what kind of solar system you will need.
 
Turning 3 55gal drums welded together. 400-500lbs when the sun is up. Custom builds don't really have exact numbers. Is there a way to run a DC motor directly from pv?
 
Turing 3 55gal drums welded together. 400-500lbs when the sun is up. Custom builds don't really have exact numbers. Is there a way to run a DC motor directly from pv?
Yes it's more efficient to run DC motors than AC motors with Solar. You need to ask someone in the know what size motor will you need to turn that drum and then get the specs on the motor.
 
I really don't know much about motors. I figure I'll start posting here & by the time I am ready to start building I should have a pretty good idea of what I need. Like is it better to run a motor on each grader or 1 big motor to run them all. This is kinda what I am looking at doing
 
I have done some small gold mining. Never worked out for me as in a living.

I can only think that you could look in a magazine like the ICMJ Prospecting and Mining Journal, which has a classified section, check that section and figure the specs. I can guarantee that any equipment you’re thinking of would be gas run. You should be able to get some sort of power measurement for the device like in Watts or Horsepower. That would be a start with 746 watts per horsepower.

The power requirements for my tiny, minuscule operation were. So much, solar was not practical. I’m talking simply running a 1000 Gallon Per Hour 12 volt pump. To do this, I would need two panels hooked up to it and a battery. I showed to a small miner in my state, who was one of about then people in the state earning a living off small mining, and he could not understand why he would go through all the trouble of hooking that solar equipment up, when this could be run off his truck.

Running equipment with no battery is a pretty bad idea. The power is not very smooth and will go in spurts and will likely have a “messy“ waveform that could cause damage to equipment.
 
HAHAHAHA!!! Thats so hilarious.

Okay, real talk, great info. Much thanks

#1 not really trying to make a living. I am trying to build a farm. If I can turn rocks into building materials & turn the gems into art or just sell them raw for top soil, bingo.
#2 I'm not pumping, I'm rolling. If that makes a difference. In the wash phase it would just be a drum full of water spinning.If that makes a difference, again, I don't know motors.
#3 okay so battery = whole system correct? Or if everything is DC, it will all be happy with no mppt/inverter? I do have a extra battery with a wanky voltage "36V" that I can purpose to this.

I studied 5 years to build a next gen farm. Now I have to be a miner to get to be a farmer. Fancy rocks are nice tho.
 
a 1/2hp gear reduction motor should be able to roll your 55 gallon drums if you get a 40 or 50:1 ratio on the gear motor it would give you a metric shiton of tourqe startup surge might be rough you would need some really large contactors to keep them from burning up. just letting the panels rip would be a bad idea as chances are you will end up with a brush motor in that size range, and letting it sit not turning yet still applying low power is a quick way to a burned up motor.
 
No way around mppt. Okay. for my oddball voltage battery then, a midnite 150 is probably best. Then a DC motor 1/2hp 36v 40-50:1. Sweet!
 
1/2 HP = ~373 watts, assuming an 80% efficient electrical/mechanical efficiency ~500 watts of DC continuous.

So, if you want it to run for 8 hrs a day, that would be 8 hrs x 500W = 4 kWh.

Assuming you're only running this in the summer with an insolation of 5, then you'd need 4000 / 5 = 800 W array.
You'd need a battery for both the motor's startup surge and to have enough power for the full 8 hours (e.g., store energy from 10-2 when making over 500 watts to consume when making less than 500 watts, see ref for more).

Hope that helps and hope to hear more on this really cool project!
 
1/2 HP = ~373 watts, assuming an 80% efficient electrical/mechanical efficiency ~500 watts of DC continuous
Although 500 watts continuous would run it, doesn’t the inverter need to be significantly oversized to start it, like 2x to 10x?

Kind of like the locked rotor amps on an Air Conditioner. A 50 gallon drum could weigh over 500 LBS filled.
 
This will be a setup separate of my home power. If I use a DC motor(s), I wont need a inverter. A big part of this is doing it on the cheep. I'll have to run a gen to weld stuff, I will use steal drums most likely. The plastic would be easy to drill but not sure how long it will last. The amounts I need to process are huge.

Some of the agates & clastic jaspers are almost basket ball size. Once its all separated by size then I have to dig around to find the gems/ fancy rocks pretty much by hand. The fancy stuff comes in all sizes. At first it was all just 'fancy rocks". Now I know a bit & exactly how it got on my property. I'm sure most of you herd of Bonneville salt flats. Well 14500 years ago it was a massive lake & it reached its tipping point & a flood like nothing we'll ever see ensued. For some random reason my property got all the fancy stuff. At least I am the only person ever to find anything like this out here. The gold that was in the flood was sluiced out on the other side of the hills behind my place. The variety is mind blowing.

A 50 gallon drum could weigh over 500 LBS filled.
I don't think the drums get filled. A few inches on the bottom as it rolls. 3 drums as full as they'll get will be 400-500lbs. I'll run it until its empty so when I start again there wont be rocks in the drums. Startup weight will be 100 lbs ish
 
... doesn’t the inverter need to be significantly oversized to start it, like 2x to 10x?...
An inverter is needed for AC, so not needed when a DC motor is used. But you're right the battery has to be big enough to supply the inrush current.
 
Several batteries to start the motor but more importantly a very large DC contactor for safety
 
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Several batteries to start the motor but more importantly a very large DC contactor for safety
Wonder if modifying a golf cart to have a PTO would work? I have a 36v golf cart LIP 100ah battery that has a 100a discharge.

Great project, any photos of the washed gems (rocks)?
I do. I started making videos about the rocks trying to find out what they were. Now I make rock videos daily. People in India are loving them. The variety makes identifying them hard.

This project is for building materials, road base & then all the fancy rocks are pretty much a bonus.
 
Not an electrical engineer myself so calculating out how many amps to kick start it is beyond me just seen what a geared dc motor can do power wise
 
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