Burning Man Electrical Optimization for Beginners!

Want to run art with batteries? Have aspirations to run your Burning Man theme camp with solar? Start here with this introductory tutorial!

Suggested supplies are a multimeter, preferably a clamp-on ammeter, a watt-hour meter (measures variable loads), love.

Here's where we get a sense of how much electricity we'll actually use.

Itemize everything you want to run with electricity that plugs into the wall.

Find the wattage of each item. There's usually a 'price tag' on the cord or back of the device that lists a number of watts or amps. To convert from amps to watts, multiply amps by 120 volts.

Multiply by the number of hours you plan to use each item.

For music, take the number of watts on your speaker, divide this number by 10. This is the average electrical consumption at full blast. So your 1000 watt speaker uses a rough average of about 100 watts.

For refrigerators and similar intermittent loads, use a watt-hour meter such as a Kill-a-Watt to measure the device's total electrical use over a day or so.

Tips:

Air conditioners... for frog snakes please use an evaporative cooler rather than a standard air conditioning unit. This will give a roughly 100x electrical savings. Yes one hundred times more electrically efficient. Like 20 watts instead of 2000 watts. https://www.instructables.com/Easy-Mode-FIGJAM-5-Gallon-Bucket-Swamp-Cooler/

Lights can be quite efficient, or not at all. LED lights are about 10 times more efficient than incandescent lights. Red incandescent christmas lights are bright white lights with red paint on them and they use vastly more electricity than an equivalent LED version. Mood lighting can be efficient if it's small direct lighting eg. faerie lights, whereas using a lot of lamp shades block light and require more energy hungry lights.

Not sure if your lights are LED or incandescent? Generally LED lights have plastic bulbs and tend to run cool; also turn the bulb off and if the filament is visible it's usually yellow. Some LED lights flicker. By contrast incandescent lights are usually glass and hot and the filament looks like a thin piece of wire. Here's a video demonstration of the differences https://youtube.com/shorts/tl9zBHpq4HI Now take your incandescent lights and smash them.

And here's a video walking through the calculations https://youtu.be/InI7FjmWTsg

Here's how to track down phantom electrical loads.

Look at your electrical budget. Now measure your actual loads and look for discrepancies. Say you budgeted 100 watts but your load is actually 300W. What's happening?

Measure with your watt hour meter starting from your electrical source and work your way down the distribution chain until you find your vampire. Is there something plugged into the end of your Christmas lights? Did a set of incandescent Christmas lights sneak into your collection? Is there a toaster or coffee maker drinking all your electrons? Check back in a week or so for a video demonstration.

Find a matching plug for your ebike battery's output. Use a DC to DC voltage converter to change the voltage to suit your needs. The converter must have and input range that matches your battery's fully charged and discharged state.

Most ebikes use a nominal 48 volt lithium ion battery. (We won't go into lithium phosphate here) This number means the battery has 48/3.7= 13 cells connected in series. A single lithium cell has a nominal voltage of 3.7v but it actually ranges from 3v when empty to 4.2v when full. So your 48v battery has a minimum of 3v x 13 cells = 39v, and 4.2v x 13 cells = 54.6v when full.

Your voltage converter needs to handle a range of 39v through 54.6v plus some buffer on each side. But you might want to use a different battery later so I like to use converters with a very wide input range like 20v through 90v.

The converter's output can be whatever you need. 5v for simple old school USB, 12v for car accessories and many RV appliances. Amperage must also suit your needs; use a small amperage converter for small loads, or bigger ones for bigger loads. For example say you wanted 120 watts at 12v. Since volts x amps = watts, you need at least a 10A converter, plus some headroom so use a 25A converter.

Make sure your wire gauge is thick enough to handle your loads.

Here's a video example

https://youtu.be/4OOm-61mL5o

Electric cars are huge conveniently portable batteries. The easiest way to access this electricity is through the 12v system. Electric cars have two batteries, one huge high voltage battery, and a regular 12 volt car battery to run the headlights, windshield wiper motors and other regular car stuff.

There are two main traps, the car usually has to be 'on' (and stay on), and the loads have to go through the 12v battery's current sensor. The current sensor is how the car knows precisely how much electricity has gone out of the 12v battery, and the car then knows exactly how much to recharge the 12v battery. (The exact charging regime may vary with make and model)

Here's an example in excruciating detail:

https://youtu.be/YzUyVGGUBp0

Congratulations! Your music's electrical budget is now 10 times smaller than it seemed at first. Your cooling budget is now 100 times smaller. Your mood lighting is way more efficient. You know how to budget. You know how to look for energy vampires. And you can run the whole thing off your ebike or ecar!