Water pumping system

In the Folkecenter you can find two different solar-water pumping systems.

One of them demonstrates that the solar electricity can be used by small electric motors to provide people with drinking water at rural areas. This installation contains an array with 7 monocrystalline modules (made by Siemens in USA) which produce DC electricity. After inverting this DC electricity to AC, a small electric pump can utilize this energy to lift 30 m3/day water from 5 meter deep.

Technical details

Siemens PV modules. Each of them contains 36 monocrystalline cells.

Open circuit voltage is 21.7 V, Short circuit current is 3.35 A.

Each of the modules has 53 W output.

The electric motor: Grundfos , AC .

DC/AC inverter Grundfos SA 1000

The second water pumping system is situated in the Plus Energy House. This equipment is used to lift water between two fish-tanks and shows that the solar energy can be utilized in the agriculture or in the industry. An interesting feature of this system is that it uses a DC motor instead of inverting the electricity from DC to AC. The power demand is covered by 3 monocrystalline PV modules. These modules were produced by the Italian Italsolar company. You can find there further PV arrays. These PV’s are the third type of silicon solar cell in the Folkecenter. It is called amorphous silicon solar cells. The main difference that you can see is the arrangement. These kinds of PV’s are made by one contiguous silicon plate, thus there is no unused area on the surface of the PV cell. The amorphous array here is used to complement the monocrystalline modules if there is not enough energy from the primary supplier.
Technical details

The array contains 3 monocrystalline modules built up from 36 cells and it is made in Italy.

The 6 amorphous modules are made in UK. The typical system voltage is 14V and in case of 1000 W/m2 incoming power the output is 14 W of each module. These thin film silicon solar module were produced by Intersolar LTD. in Buckinghamshire.