How To Use A Solar Water Pump 24 Hours A Day

Today’s question is, “How can I utilize my solar pump system 24 hours a day?” So, we have three options depending on the exact system. The first option, what we always recommend, is adding a storage tank and storing water if possible: usually with gravity feed so we can have water pressure at night, whether we’re going into a house, livestock troughs or anywhere else.

Now if you don’t have elevation available or you don’t have a tank there to store water there are other options we can do with the pump system itself. So with our smaller systems, the RPS 200 through RPS 800, we can add batteries to those. Just adding batteries to the system doesn’t allow it to pump continuously 24 hours a day. I like to explain it as, we have around six hours of pumping time and by adding batteries we’re allowing that pumping time to shift, whether it’s early in the morning or into the evening.

If you’re still pumping six hours a day, then you’re using all your pump hours during that day and you’re not going to have any extra power to save for the evening and overnight. In those cases where you still need to pump a majority of the day and into the evening, in addition to batteries we also need to add extra solar panels to our system.

We can help you with the sizing of that, so once you figure out your exact water needs and the system set up, you can give us a call at 888-637-4493. We can walk you through various battery options and adding panels in order to make sure you’re pumping water as long as you need into the night.

Now, when we go into our Pro Systems, those are not battery compatible. In that case, the Pro System also has AC input with auto-switching. So the great part of that is, during the day when there’s enough solar, it’s going to switch over to solar and use all the solar power available.

In the evening, once there’s not enough power in order to pump water, it’s going to switch over to AC power. That can either be utility power or a generator if you don’t have utility power in the location. So, with our RPS 200 through 800 we also have an auto-switching system. It’s not built into our controller, so if you need the auto-switching system, let us know. We can get that over to you and that’s going to do the exact same thing. During the day, you’ll pump on solar and at night it will automatically switch over to utility power.