100+ MOBILE SOLAR GENERATORS AUCTION
- Thread starter Ralo
- Start date
Well I’m not buying anymore and anyone who hopes to buy one and flip it for a profit is probably out of luck. The market is flooded with them and there are plenty more to be auctioned off, so it’s really just a matter of whether you can use it personally or not.
Also, I thought forums were about sharing information? I thought about not posting it from the beginning but felt it could lead to bad karma. So I just do what feels right. I think there is enough to go around.
Wow I really wish I had seen this post earlier! What a steal! I live in Las Vegas and want to a/c couple a pair of SMA sunny islands with my grid tie system, but haven’t been able to find a good enough price point. If they do another one of these I’d be more than happy to inspect a lot for you while looking for my own. Lmk.
Ugh, I noticed that too. I wonder what they went for total $ yesterday... either way I’m looking at more than $7k for the two sunny islands + 48v batteries + charge controllers + wiring etc... so it still might be worth it?
renv has sunny islands @ $1800 still, and if you look on craiglist you can find people reselling these dc system trailers. top Id pay is $7k with a good working battery. This auction was odd this time around lot's disappeared. cant get them to tell me why some of the lots dont show on the page even ones i had bid on.
Hedges
I See Electromagnetic Fields!
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- Mar 28, 2020
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Looks like there are, tomorrow!
As someone said, don't count on reselling them for a profit. Market is flooded.
A third of a Billion $$$ of Warren Buffett's money, almost a billion all told, makes for a lot of units.
At cost of $40k a pop, a good fraction of that money did go into creating these nice toys for us.
Owners of solar company that caused loss for Buffett plead guilty over Ponzi scheme
The husband-and-wife owners of DC Solar, a California solar company that caused Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc <BRKa.N> to take a $377 million charge last year, pleaded guilty on Friday to involvement in an estimated $912 million Ponzi scheme.
www.reuters.com
"But according to prosecutors, about half of the 17,000 generators did not exist ..."
So the bad news is there are only 8500 PV/SI trailers to pick from. Better hurry or you might miss out!
Over 400 of them just at this one auction.
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I bought two last time thinking I could sell one on eBay for a profit, but that didn’t work. Too many already on the market and not enough people looking for “mobile solar generators”.
So I still have both. But as it turns out, I need both, because Louisiana is a terrible environment for solar. It’s cloudy most of the time but when the sun is out, it’s so damn hot (during the summer) and humid, the requirement to run air conditioning 24/7 consumes most (if not all) of the power produced by those 10 solar panels. So the batteries get very little charge during the day but continue to get drained during the night. So about every two days I have to switch from one generator to the other allowing one to charge back up.
At best I get 15kw per day and that’s with perfectly clear skies (which is very rare). 5kw-10kw is more common on partly cloudy days so maybe 10-20% charge per day. It Usually takes over 3 days to go from 50% to 100% in my area. So I still have to run my gas generators on occasion to allow the batteries to recharge. In my area, I truly need twice as many solar panels per trailer, but that’s crappy Louisiana weather for you.
And to top it all off, one of my trailers has weak batteries which makes matters even worse. I’ve tried every reconditioning method I could find but nothing has helped. Thinking of buying another trailer in hopes of getting better batteries, but I don’t have room for another one of these trailers, so I would have to dismantle it and sell off the unneeded components. Not looking forward to that.
So, if you plan on bidding on one, make sure the weather in your area is idea for solar. And keep in mind that the batteries are a gamble.
Good Luck!
So I still have both. But as it turns out, I need both, because Louisiana is a terrible environment for solar. It’s cloudy most of the time but when the sun is out, it’s so damn hot (during the summer) and humid, the requirement to run air conditioning 24/7 consumes most (if not all) of the power produced by those 10 solar panels. So the batteries get very little charge during the day but continue to get drained during the night. So about every two days I have to switch from one generator to the other allowing one to charge back up.
At best I get 15kw per day and that’s with perfectly clear skies (which is very rare). 5kw-10kw is more common on partly cloudy days so maybe 10-20% charge per day. It Usually takes over 3 days to go from 50% to 100% in my area. So I still have to run my gas generators on occasion to allow the batteries to recharge. In my area, I truly need twice as many solar panels per trailer, but that’s crappy Louisiana weather for you.
And to top it all off, one of my trailers has weak batteries which makes matters even worse. I’ve tried every reconditioning method I could find but nothing has helped. Thinking of buying another trailer in hopes of getting better batteries, but I don’t have room for another one of these trailers, so I would have to dismantle it and sell off the unneeded components. Not looking forward to that.
So, if you plan on bidding on one, make sure the weather in your area is idea for solar. And keep in mind that the batteries are a gamble.
Good Luck!
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The tower on the back looks like this:
Great for Ham Radio. I would like one of those with/without the trailer alone.
If that link doesn’t work just google US Tower ALM-21
Great for Ham Radio. I would like one of those with/without the trailer alone.
If that link doesn’t work just google US Tower ALM-21
Hedges
I See Electromagnetic Fields!
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2020
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These obviously don't have a lot of PV. 3 kW of PV x 5.5 hours is 16.5 kWh/day. Pair of Sunny Island can produce 12 kW or 288 kWh/day but good for starting almost any motor load.
I only saw them after I had bought a pallet of Sunny Island from a reseller, and pallets of panels - a better fit for my home application. The trailers look like a good deal, but you would want more panels. You can buy 3 kW of PV from SanTan or other vendors for about $750 to $1000. It looked to me like panels could be doubled by mounting with hinges and folding out. Or add more as ground mounts. Consider grid-tie inverters for expansion beyond what the charge controllers support. Roof-mounted with GT inverter they could play with the Sunny Islands on the trailer.
I make about 85 kWh/day, approach 100 kWh with ideal conditions, with the 1600 sf of mostly older panels I have up (about 1/3 of the total). My newer panels are 50% more efficient so just swapping them onto existing racks will increase power.
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