For the past 6 months or so I've been running a little solar off-grid power solution at our firework storage container.

It is made up of basically 2 50w solar panels, a Morningstar MPPT charge controller and a Elecsol 100aH battery. It's current purpose is to power a little alarm panel, but I have bigger plans for the system once it is proven a workable solution.

To monitor it, and to also test how well it will stand up to running a CCTV system 24/7 I've also been running a Mikrotik router, with a 3G card running a VPN back home so I can remotely monitor the Morningstar controller.

During the summer the experiment went well, but as the days are getting shorter I am starting to get battery low warnings from the alarm panel. Shutting off the Mikrotik router is currently solving this problem, but I had hoped that I could run at least the router, monitoring hardware and at least once CCTV camera. Clearly I am lacking in capacity and diversity in the system.

Unfortunately due to a quite frankly terrible bit of monitoring hardware from a company called PacketFlux and my inability to get it working with Cacti as it should, I don't have any useful data to play with. Shame as that was the whole point!

I was just wondering if anyone has any experience in this type of installation, I am looking to avoid big pitfalls as I am already spending too much on this already.

I think I have already decided to add another battery and change the solar controller to something with built in monitoring (or at least one that can send direct via GPRS). But I was also thinking about adding wind power to the mix, anyone have suggestions ???

Edit - I should also add I plan to run some 12v LED lights from the system as being there in the dead of night with no lighting is just plain scary !!!

Cheers

Cris