this is uh the part e spreadsheet spreadsheet tool we're going to talk about that can be used to help you design your system as well and um we're going to use a spreadsheet here let's use a spreadsheet to size our system to the loads and the the site where we're going to install it there there's a tool on the Campbell scientific website to help you optimize your system and it's a spreadsheet type tool on the steps that you would go through is you would select the equipment that you'll be using from a drop down list you will determine what scan rate or execution interval you want to use for your sensors for communications equipment you would select a communication rate that you need that you're required to do or you want to do from your site assuming some kind of cell modem or something you would enter your desired Reserve days and then you would add a location that is nearby your installation site to give you a close approximation and then you would size the battery to give you the reserve time and select the solar panel that will give you the energy you need from that location in the worst month of the year so you can download the tool here you go to the Campbell scientific website and you click on the support Tab and then when you do you'll see this services and support with this gentleman working or doing some maintenance on a station on the right side uh part way down there's a says other resources and there's a download box or a link and you can click on that and then you'll have a search bar on the right side when you get to the downloads and you can type in power budget and then click the search button and you'll see this box down here show up that says power budget spreadsheet 1. 03 and it's a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet where you can estimate the power budget for your system now if you are not if you don't have an account so you can log in you can just click on the add to list and right here you would put in your name and your email address we are going to send a link to your email address so it should be a good email address that you're you're looking at you can put your name of your organization and what country you're from and then say submit and it will send you an email and you will be able to click on that email and when you click on that email it will start downloading your program and it will show up in your downloads folder and sometimes that scene at the bottom of your browser window that is coming and you can click on that and open in location if you want and then you would need to unzip that okay so you would right click on that of the zip up folder and extract all activate the content by clicking on the extracted file and selecting security and unblock it this is a folder that has some macros in it so they're they're worried that it's the somebody's trying to do something to damage their computer or something but um you would uh you would unblock that so that it will work otherwise it won't work properly you would start up the spreadsheet tool and you'll respond as appropriate so let me show you kind of what you'll see this is the way you activate content so you would right click on the folder you would click on the folder where the file is saved and then you'd right click on the file and choose properties okay and this but this box right here should show up and on the general tab on the left here you would select unblock check box down here for security and then you would say okay if you don't see the unblock checkbox and properties then try one of the options below I don't remember what that was let's see here okay once you've done that when you open it you're going to see that it's in protected view okay so they're worried that it might have viruses or something you would click on enable editing and or sometimes it shows up this way security warning some active content has been disabled so you might have to say enable content and if uh if it's still secured and you haven't unlocked it then it will say this Microsoft has blocked the macros from running because of the sources of file is untrusted so uh you'll probably need to go back and and unblock that okay once you get past those steps then you'll see um uh a warning that this tool is estimation of your power needs only um this tool is just a guesstimate it's a pretty good guesstimate of your power usage but it's not going to be exactly 99. 999 perfect because we don't know the exact details of your site is there trees they're shading the panels and stuff like that but it should get you pretty close estimates so you click OK there and um when Eric was uh was getting this version ready he added a link to another power budget spreadsheet on his computer and forgot to edit that out and so you don't need to worry about this link it's not critical just say continue without any editing the links okay and then when you open it up this is what it looks like okay now on the uh on the left side where the blue part was this part up here on the left right over here you will see some drop down boxes and if you click on one of these drop down boxes you'll see a bunch of data loggers and sensors and you can scroll down and see a bunch of other equipment okay and you can go to the next box and do it again and select another piece of equipment and it will try to estimate the average power consumption in this system total down at the bottom okay and you can go up or down here on your scan neural to increase it from Five Seconds to six or seven or ten uh we're down to decrease it down to one second or half a second or something like that and the comms interval on the right is also similar the this one in this case it's every 12 hours twice a day something like that so you can go down to make it everywhere every hour or once a day just by uh going up and down on these little um these little control arrows there um let's go to the next slide here and [Music] let's see the green area that was in the middle is where you put in your reserve time so it says Reserve desired backup you want 14 days then you can put it here if you wanted more you would click on the up Arrow or down arrow to drop it down to seven days or ten days or whatever you'd like okay and then we need to find a location now and so this was a graph where you could select a location right now it's Glacier National Park Montana and so you could look in this list to see if it happens to be one close by it is probably not but we'll show you how to add a new location but basically this is starting in October and no so this would be the first half of this would be October the second half would be no end to the November and then it would be December and January in these two boxes uh February March here April May here June July here and then August September over here so it's divided into six in their two month increments here excuse me the green line is showing you uh what the battery will probably be at the end of every day the end of the sun being up and so in this case it's 100 every day so this the solar panel is sized appropriately to supply it with enough sun on good days and the load is showing in amp hours and blue at the bottom and the the orange solar input is above the blue load so we're going we're doing well if the blue line is above the Orange Line during part of the year then your solar panel is probably not big enough and your battery will be discharging during those those days or weeks or months okay and the green graph is the percentage so it's on the right side so it's showing 100 all the time in this particular case now if you wanted to add a new location there's there's some websites you can go to one of them is called uh geismo.
com you can see some the solar resources that are available or maybe you have some other data or real data you could do those uh once you've got those things you would enter those that information into the worksheet and here's an example of going to the geismo website for example you can click on the Americas if you live in the Americas uh you can click on America's here and you can go to the United States or Canada or somewhere and then you can go to your state in this case Utah and then Logan is where our corporate offices are so I put Logan here and then you see this sheet right here and talks about this location Logan Utah United States and it talks about sunrise sunset now you notice that there's a scroll bar on the right side and we can scroll down so I've circled the down arrow here and we want to go down toward the bottom and when we get down here the last two things one of them is this box solar energy and surface meteor Metrology meteorology the very top row is insulation in kilowatt hours per meter Square per day that's Peaks on hours that's what we want and the worst month of the year is um December at 1. 72 Peak Sun hours and then the average minimum temperature is important because that affects the chemistry of the battery so we do the temperature as well looks like the lowest temperature is 9. 8 but we can add all of these 12 months throughout the year and we can get a curve for the whole year so we would click on this add uh edit locations box and then we can bring that data we just found on the website and typed them into these boxes and we can put a name in there the location and once we've got all those boxes filled with all that information we can click on add new at the top up here and then we can click on after we put the name in we can put add right here and then it will show up in our list and it will graph the data for you right here now this is just a Data Logger instead of a whole list of equipment so this is probably not a good example because it's saying we need a 0.
3 watt solar panel and a one amp hour battery to last 14 days because it's not doing anything it's just sitting there so yeah we would need to put in there or all of our our loads and over here on the right we can see how the battery has been derated because of the cold temperatures in these months so the battery amp hours has a little bit of a curve here in the cold to make up for the temperature okay this chart on the left is showing the storm simulation and that would be um orange would be without a storm so the sun is good enough during this worst month of the year to keep this system alive the green is without the solar coming in and so it would last approximately 14 days which was what our desire was and so and then here's our depth of discharge per day we're doing seven percent per day so we're probably pretty good in that case there's some there's some other boxes over here about solar panels and battery size so you can click on these bottom boxes right here to increase or to pick the the smallest possible size solar panel that will still meet the needs of this location and then you can Auto Select a battery which will try to give you the smallest battery possible that will still survive the number of days that you that you wanted if you have too small of a size here it will kind of start showing this red around here that means to maybe your system's too small and you need to increase the battery size and so uh back to this sheet again um be fun to play with this so um download this and play with it put your system in here put your your times in here put your reserve time you want pick your location size your panels and your batteries accordingly and you should have a good system that will survive you what it will do is it will take this average milliamps per hour multiply it by 24 to give you the amp hours per day that it will be using and based upon your location right here and when you select this it will give you the smallest panel in the list that will produce more than what you need for that worst month of the year and it will give you a range of the production of that solar panel at this location down here on this curve and showing you December January here and the so that would be the low sun and that's the one it will use for the calculations and then the maximum sun and Sun hours that you would get in the highest part of the year so it kind of gives you an idea of the range that that solar panel will give you and with this battery 17 amp hour battery and the cold temperature over here the battery will be derated to 12 amp hours for the winter time and so um and with this particular battery you'd get about 16.
