Lizard heating by solar power - is it practical?

Hi - I was wondering if you could help me, I'm looking to buy solar panels for my garden shed but don't know what one would be suitable. In the shed I have a glass tank with a lizard in it and I would need the panel to power an 80w fluorescent tube that is on 12 hours a day and a 190w ceremic heater bulb which is on 24 hours a day. Can you help? Cheers Andrew

Hi Andrew,

You can use the solar panel calculator to work out how big a solar panel array you would need. But I can tell you now that running a heater all the time would require a huge array unfortunately - 190W is a very big load to be powering for 24 hours a day. In fact I usually reckon that in the depths of winter you need a solar array with a rating of 20 times the average power draw of the equipment you want to power, as on cloudy days you don't get a big return from the panels. So, for a 190W continuous load, you would need about 3800W of solar panels - which would cost over £10000 and wouldn't fit on your shed roof anyway. Sorry!

If the ceramic heater is on a thermostat and is only actually on 10% of the time, that would make a huge difference - it would drop the array size to only 380W, which might just be practical.

Expensive lizard. Even on mains electricity you are burning about 5.5 kWh per day with that light on 12 hours a day and heater on continuously; at 13p per kWh that works out at over £250 per year.