12V DC Heating Elements

 This is a follow up on a previous post concerning survival level applications for PV and battery packs. The idea here is to find the lowest price to give people warmth and light using minimal circuitry.

I won't go into the weird sauce of how I connected my battery. But the big idea there is that I'm not using any inverters for me DC heaters. Inverters and even voltage regulators introduce inefficiencies and we want people to get as much bang for the buck as possible.

First of all, here is a picture of the heating elements for under 20 bucks on Amazon:

Second, these elements get very hot... like over 140 degrees F... enough to make food safe to eat.

With that out of the way, the logic of the system is this:

1. A 400 Watt solar array charges a .25 kWh battery pack in less than an hour in full sun (using a BMS circuit to step the voltage down)

2. The 12V 100W heating elements will then drain the battery overnight providing more than enough heat for a single person (not enough to heat a 12' x 12' room) for about 2.5 hours

So following this logic we could say 4, .25 kWh battery packs would be more than enough so that one person could sleep comfortably all night and even into the day (8 to 10 hours).

Let's talk money. The battery pack costs $35 for .25 kWh of energy. The heating elements cost $20. The solar panels cost roughly $250. So all in, this system cost me $310. If we wanted it to last all night, we're looking at more like $350.

So for $350 a person could sleep comfortably overnight every night for 5 years. Then it's just the cost of replacing the battery pack after that (maybe $40), for another 5 years of service.

But you may have noticed that the solar panels were only put to work for a single hour... so this person would have 7 more hours of daylight to use the panels for other systems. I'm thinking the heating elements could be plugged in directly to the solar panels during the day to provide daytime heat during colder months. Essentially this person could survive under a canopy in a sleeping bag in Yellowstone National Park all winter long... provided they had food for $350.