In addition to the solar panels and other items received from Amorn Solar today, I also decided to pick up a cheap 12VDC floor fan (pictured above). We will be using 24V for our DC lines, so if we use something like this later, we will probably have to step it down to 12V, but there are some cheap devices we’ve used from eBay that do that easily enough.

You can see in the picture the small 7Ah 12V battery on the floor next to the fan. With just this small battery, it works quite fine, and I can move the fan around with it and use it to cool off while I am wiring up the electricity in the house. This was actually the main reason I bought the thing. And it worked quite well for that today.

The second reason was just to check it out. It had a bit of a “cheap plastic Chinese made product” from the picture in the catalog, and that is pretty much what it is. It came completely disassembled (in about 10 parts) with absolutely no assembly manual of any sort. It has a strange LED light on the main body (that fortunately only turns on if you switch on the “LED light” button). I’m not sure who wants to shine a light at about 50cm off the ground from the direction of a fan. If it were a reading light or something it would need to be above the fan. And the buttons and other moving parts feel pretty loose and cheap. It definitely doesn’t feel as nice as a good Hatari fan that we normally buy at the department store.

But still, it does blow air well enough, so the moment I turned it on I decided it was worth the 850THB (~20USD) I spent on it. (I’m tired of soaking my shirt all the way through with sweat every day when I come to the house to wire the AC electrical circuits.) I’ve found that in Thailand, you can live okay without air conditioning, but you can’t live without air circulation.

It draws about 1 amp at 12V, so one of these batteries should run for about 7 hours. We currently have 2 of these small batteries at the house for 24VDC LED lighting tests. So it should last long enough to get the solar panels hooked up and ready for charging. (And with the bigger 220Ah batteries, too.)