hy don’t we see more solar and wind power options on fish houses?
Great thread to see what ideas are out there.
I don’t have a fish house, but I run an off-the-grid fish camp in the Canadian sub-arctic with solar power and my hunting property is off the grid and will soon run on all solar.
Why don’t we see more solar power? Because it requires a little more thinking rather than just buying a Honda generator and cranking it up full blast.
Also, I don’t think a lot of guys have outdated ideas about solar and don’t believe you can actually power a fish house with solar. They also assume that there’s not enough sunlight in the winter.
Biggest thing I’ve learned about solar is you have to SIZE everything right.
Here’s something many don’t understand:
Even on a full overcast day with no visible sun, my setup in Canada charges at about 25% of capacity. On a sunny day, the batteries are fully charged from their overnight use by about 9:00 AM. On a cloudy day, it takes until about noon. So a properly sized system has plenty of capacity to handle even a full day of dark clouds and rain.
Modern solar panels and charge controllers are SO GOOD that my setup in Canada records charging from the light of a full moon. No joke, even the light reflected off a near-full moon is enough for the solar panels to collect and produce a charge.
So even in the winter, if your solar system is sized correctly, you should be able to change multiple batteries even during short daylight.
The house came with a 5 watt panel. I mounted that on the exterior wall. 5 watt is the smallest you can use without a charge controller. I figured that would be enough to trickle charge when I’m not using the house. If it is not, I may upgrade to a 50 watt or 100 watt. My goal is to never have to charge the batteries or maybe only charge them once or twice a season at most.
5 watt is very, very small for a panel. Not saying it won’t work or you can’t do it, but IMO if you’re getting by with 5W now, you’ll be loving life even at 100 watts.
In Canada I run the following setup and this has been in place for years. This is a super-low-tech setup and it’s been functioning flawlessly for 10 years now.
Solar- Single 200 Watt panel.
Charge controller – Old style charge controller, not even a MPPT controller although I’ll be upgrading it this summer.
Battery – 110 Ahr lead acid.
We’re running a lake water pump, all the lights everywhere in camp, and we have a power station for charging devices. I also run a small inverter (200 watts) for devices like power tool battery chargers that don’t run off of 12 volt.
Everything in Canada is 12 volt DC, which has its downsides, but the positive is it’s super-simple.
I’m going to add a separate 800 watt system with MPPT charge controllers and a 2000 watt constant PSW inverter soon. This will give us the ability to run an electric refrigerator, which is currently our biggest “energy hog” because we have to bring propane in with us.
Basically, even if you had to run a TV all day, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a solar system that would support that. There are online calculators where you can run the numbers.
Just a word about small wind generators. I looked into this because it seemed like with a lake cabin, wind would be a good add-on. Most guys that I have communicated with on forums and FB groups that have actually gone this route say don’t do it. The vibration from the generator is bothersome if you attach it to your house and the power delivered per dollar spent make it a poor value. Across the board, these guys have told me if you need more power, buy more panels or more batteries. Wind power only adds value in very specialized situations where the owner has unusually high and constant winds. The only guy I’ve ran into that has made it successful is on an island in the atlantic off the Scottish coast and he has BIG turbines.
Great topic though.
the wheel house guys wouldn’t be able to make the weekend though. 
