Solar powered

[Tsukiyomi-sakura]

How many panels and Battery's do you think a 15-20g Nano would need to run lights, pumps, and skimmer? Looking into making a 'green' nano in the future.

[Hookup]

It's not a question of tank size, but of wattage required.  Add up all of the load on your planned system and add some for buffer / peaks.  Then find a "real" solar powered dealer/distributor in town.

However, this will be VERY expensive.  Yes, it's nice to be green, but the reality of solar-power with todays technology is that is it simply out of reach for most of us to ever consider in terms of start-up expense.  Also, in our climate you have to keep things cleared of snow, leaves, debris... It's not as simple as in Arizona for example.

Finally, if you really want to be more-green you might want to look at installing solar-light-tubes in place of your lighting.  You'd still run your pumps and heaters off of regular hydro, but the lights, which are the biggest cost and draw on electricity, could be "green".  There are threads on RC where people have replaced their halides with this natural solution.

Also, you might find during your research of "solar power" that the environmental impact related to the mfg of the batteries and pannels, as well as the associated eventual disposal has a pretty significant impact, so maybe it's not as green as it appears.

Good luck with your quest.

[Tsukiyomi-sakura]

Yeah I was thinking of mostly the lights since they are a killer

[Saltcreep]

Once you mention pumps and skimmer you sort of take it out of the realm of reality for affordable solar technology. If you limit it to just lighting, I think some kind of LED array would be very doable. I currently run quite a bit of LED solar powered lighting at the cottage simply because there are fewer restrictions on towers and the like and it's a good place to experiment. You would be amazed at how many LEDs you can run off a single lead-acid storage battery. To put it into perspective, you can string together 900, 60 LED strings of typical 1/8" diode Christmas lights before you approach the capacity of a single household 15A circuit. That is 54,000 LEDs.