Off grid solar powered garage door opener!

Just a short demonstration of my off grid solar powered garage door opener. I installed this Sears Diehard garage door opener with battery backup 6 months ago. The motor inside the opener is a 12VDC unit and was designed to be powered by a small 4.5AH 12V DC sealed lead acid battery in case grid power was lost during a brownout or blackout. I added another 8Ah battery wired in parallel to the stock 4.5Ah battery to give it more reserve if we had several days of very cloudy weather. My solar panel is a 20 watt ebay Chinese unit that I bought for around $60.00. I had a Morningstar Sunkeeper solar charger sitting around so that's what I used. If I had to buy a new one I'd buy Genasun GV-4 4amp MPPT solar charger instead since it would harvest way more energy than the PWM controller per a given amount of sunshine. Oh yeah, the cable from the solar panel to the charge controller was made from a 12 gauge extension cord which is weather proof, more or less.

I installed the system about 6 months ago and have not had to plug it into the wall once though that could be easily done in case there were too many cloudy days in a row. I did not modify the garage door opener in any way. The point of this installation was to see if it could be done and I can say yes, it can be done for about $150 in addition to the garage door opener. Maybe someone who watches this video might really need to have a solar powered garage door opener. Now I won't pay anything to open this garage door ever again!

Believe it or, not most garage door openers draw 4 watts constantly if they are plugged into the wall which equals 35 kWh per year! I figure I save about 50kWh per year or about $5.00 so my payback is only 30 years. On the plus side, I think I have a big enough solar panel to power all three garage door openers which would bring the payback down to ten years. We'll see.

If you watched the video, the garage door moved less than perfectly smooth with a lot of noise. I found out recently that I had to bad, seized up rollers for the safety cable system and the door moves silently and smoothly after replacing these two rollers. I am still using my original batteries.