Get the weather station up an running with all of the sensors your planning on. Doesn’t have to be in finished installtion form, just have all of the electronics working. Then you measure the current draw while it is operating. This gives you an estimated power draw. Add 20%. That gives you a good estimate of your needed power budget.
Then to estimate your solar supply requiremenst, you need to be able to supply that power budget for the day, directly from the solar power PLUS the store the needed power in the batteries to run when the sun isn’t out. This basic value needs to be factor up to account for cloudy days, lower conversion, etc.
So for instance if you have a 10W panel, that is 10W under ideal conditions, but you will usually get less power then that out of it. Most likely about 70-80% of that rated value. You need to have enough power available to run your station AND recharge the batter from the night drain. But you may have two or more consecutive days of cloud cover (more the less likely you will have a power failure under prime weather conditions). This means you need enough battery power to last through 48-72 hours of consumption with no recharge… And potentially under high or low temperatures where battery performance is likely to be bad. So your additional power requirements need to be able to replace somewhat more (say 20%) then what you drain in a typically night so that you could slowly recharge the battery when you have the occasional cloudy day.
All that said, it should become apparent, that I don’t think solar is a good choice…
What I am doing with mine is running DC to the station, and using a power monitor (wtachdog) from the same supplier, to detect if power goes out. That kicks in a small LiPo battery to provide UPS service for a couple of hours. The line powered DC supplies trickle charging to the LiPo through the same watchdog power board I mentioned…
Revise project plan
