Solar waterfall help please

[d938]

Hi everyone, I had a account here a long time ago.

I need your help please if you would be so kind.

basically my parents bought me one of these small garden waterfall features last Christmas but it runs on mains power via a dc transformer.

what I’m wanting to do is wire it up to a solar panel with maybe a battery as it has 3 little led lights in it for at night time. The transformer says it’s output is 12v so I’m guessing -

a 12v solar panel
Solar controller
Some sort of 12v battery maybe a house alarm or wheelchair battery?

how do the solar controllers work? I see they have 3 connections - panel, batt and load, so the load would be the fountain through the day, the batt is the charging of the battery and the panel obv connects to the panel, am I right in thinking that once it goes dark or not enough sun the battery automatically kicks in through the controller?

I can’t help but think the cost of this setup is going to be more than the whole water feature cost lol

can anyone steer me in the right direction of components I would need etc please?

thanks everyone

matt

 

[NickK]

The main thing is to know how much power it’s taking. Also solar panels area great and even worse with the U.K. sun.
You can get a device that you plug in a battery, panel(s) and the load. The device does the magic.
A deep cycle battery is a must such as a leisure battery. Then it’s case of having enough uk sun to provide enough solar power to run the device and charge the battery for night time.

Oddly I was looking at 24V solar with a 240-24V PSU to provide power into my koi pond when the sun wasn’t enough. 280W panels for example.

 

[d938]

Ok thanks for your reply, I’ve got a Greenhouse sensation quad grow solar and I’ve got the solar panel out from that, this also has a tiny pump on it very similar to the waterfall one and even though it is cloudy the pump on that is running pretty good, the solar panel says it is only 7.6v so not powerful enough for the water feature I don’t think.

it’s looking like it’s going to be too much effort just to keep the water feature running at night. I have some solar fairy lights by lumify which have a 18650 cell which is exactly the sort of thing I need just maybe on a bigger scale lol