RfR Eurobodalla launches Community Access Solar Trailer

Bega District News

RfR Eurobodalla launches Community Access Solar Trailer, Friday, August 30.

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Steve. I volunteer with the RFR and it's wonderful. I really enjoy the work.

00:09So this trailer, it's the community access solar trailer. We started with a smaller one made of

00:16all recycled components. It wasn't robust enough to be able to let people take it away,

00:22it has a lot of idiosyncrasies. So that's now a camper at the RFR. Occasionally we take it out

00:30for espresso coffee and juice and that kind of thing at events. This one is something that

00:37we were working on for some time. It's actually taken ages to build it,

00:42sort of one day a week and on weekends. Anyway, this is the heart of it. We've got

00:47eight panels. They're all independently set up so we can close down or lift up as needed

00:56and each bay has a kind of juice. But this is the back that was designed to be there.

01:00The charge controller takes the energy from the panels and turns it into energy for the batteries.

01:08The inverter charger takes the energy from the batteries, turns it into energy we can

01:13plug things into and it accepts energy from other sources to charge the batteries.

01:19It's got all the bells and whistles and again we got a lot of this stuff was donated or at least

01:24fed to us at a highly discounted cost. Here we have the office. The idea was that we can take

01:32this as a forward office or forward response trailer for something like RFS or emergency

01:41services or we can take it as a supply unit for a tiny hut, you know, for a small home

01:48say out to Narragundra if there's more disaster issues which they're prone to out there.

01:55And yeah in the office here we've got the Starlink which again that was

02:05donated by the tech exec who also sourced the realtor to help us get the funding to

02:14get the data connection. The main part of the funding came from WWF so that helped us purchase

02:23a lot of this material to go onto the trailer and in the trailer and of course my business

02:29Micro Energy Systems donated the labour and some of the material. We've got some adaptable area here

02:37which you can sleep in and we can we can adapt it and possibly

02:47change a few things so that it can be utilised in different ways. We're thinking maybe building

02:52an awning or a tent along here so you know it becomes a self-contained sort of living area.

03:00We've got a gas bottle in there which is certified by

03:05Tooba Plumbing. They do the work for materials only and the young fellow there, he won a Prince

03:12of the Year award. Brilliant. It's challenging working on this kind of environment. It took him

03:16a whole day. Don't bill us for it. A plumber. Really good. Good plumbing service and really nice going.

03:23We've got water bottles in here and a pump. All this stuff is run off the

03:32DC. We take the 48 volt from the big lithium battery up that end and we transform it

03:39down to 12 volt for 12 volt pins. It's a bit more efficient than running everything off 240.

03:45What's the power capacity, the generation of the thing?

03:51Like I said, we could run a tiny home with it. Pretty well. Anything you can plug into a power

03:58point, a 15 amp power point, it will power. How long it will power it for depends on how much

04:05sun we have on the panels and how heavy they're loading. A best guess, it will run

04:13a small home all day all night and then when the sun comes up the next day it'll run it.

04:19If there's not much sun, say for example we've got a situation where we've got a lot of airborne

04:25colloid smoke in the air and it's very low sun, we've got a little generator we can connect.

04:30The battery capacity is 12 kilowatt hours so for a small house that runs reasonably

04:37efficient off grid, then no problem at all. I mean we're running. At the moment we've got a

04:42little induction cooktop, we've got a 60 litre freezer, 60 litre fridge and all the offices.

04:49That's all running at the moment. It's hardly using any energy. It's all coming from the solar panels

04:55at the moment so it would run that all night. There's a little gas hot water system with a shower

05:00and a little sink set up on a table that gives us water up to around 40 degrees

05:08if we run it slow. It's not extremely hot and we have the kitchen set up here. It's got your

05:16microwaves and all that sort of all the gear here as opposed to the jug, gas powered barbecue, sink.

05:24This is Alex who's doing onions. Onion girl. This van here spent probably I would say at least 50%

05:32of the trailer construction is down to this guy.

05:40Quite proud of that. Yeah and Lisa was saying earlier that there were no plans,

05:46no precedent for something like this so you've sort of manufactured it from a...

05:49It's been an on-the-fly. Yeah I sit down with an A4 page and I draw it with a ruler.

05:55You know I hadn't used CAD or anything. We've just hand drawn everything and then applied it

06:01and then scribbled it out and started again and then applied it and then go oh that works.

06:06Oh maybe we should change it up a little and so I've got a book full of drawings which only me and

06:11Jay can read. And part of today is a bit of feedback from some of the groups that are

06:17potentially using it. Extra things they'd like to see on there or stuff that could amend it.

06:22What's the best way to get it out there? I don't want this stuck in the backyard of our depot

06:27or here. It needs to go out and be used. That's why we developed it. So we know that we can get

06:32festivals in. People will see it around. They'll see it out there at festivals doing all sorts of

06:38things but it's for emergency response and we need to know how that's going to work, the logistics

06:44of it and that's what this crew in here at the moment are discussing. And if there's anything,

06:49any ways we can adapt this and possibly if it works well and we want to make some more of these,

06:56do we make them smaller? Do we incorporate things that aren't in this one? Don't incorporate things

07:04that aren't really necessary? All that kind of feedback is essential for this to grow

07:10and to be utilised. Fantastic.

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