Do Solar Water Pumps Require Batteries?

Today’s question is, “Do Solar Water Pumps Need Batteries?” A majority of our solar water pump systems don’t require batteries because they’re direct drive. That means we take the power from the sun and our controller uses that to directly drive the motor. It adjusts the speed of the motor to make sure we’re matching exactly the solar power coming in to maximize the amount of water we’re pumping in any given solar condition.

If it’s possible to keep the system simple, we prefer to do the direct drive method. In those cases either we fill up a stock tank that allows for a couple of days of water or we fill up a storage tank that also allows for extended periods of water because we won’t be pumping at night and we won’t be pumping on really cloudy days.

For a lot of applications that is going to work just fine, but there are a few – like pressurized systems, where we need to add batteries in order to make sure we can maintain that pressure at night and pump on cloudy days. A majority of our systems are already compatible with batteries, so if you have that type of condition where you need a pump at night then we can add on batteries and usually when we do that we also add on to the solar array to give the whole system a little bit more power.

We can charge up those batteries during the day when the sun is shining and use that power at night or on other cloudy days. It’s really going to come down to your exact application of whether we can use direct drive or whether we need to use batteries on your system.