DIY Solar Panels

[91cavgt]

Looks good! 4 of those would be 600 watts and about 32 amps of current in direct sunlight. Since you have an MPPT controller, wire the panels in series on the roof and run the wire in to the charge controller. This will decrease your power loss in the cable since instead of running 32 amps at 12 volt in the cable (which you would need a large cable for that), you would be running 8 amps at 48 volt so you could go with a lot smaller of a cable, like 10-12 gauge stranded wire.

[Brazos Hunter]

I'm stocked! The other 2 will be here Monday or Tuesday! I need to make a Lowes run after they come in to get more wire and materials to mount them.

[bundyducks]

following

[tbeak]

subscribed for this

[Brazos Hunter]

My other two panels came in yesterday! I'll mount them with pics Monday.

[Brazos Hunter]

Alright, all four panels are now installed and going. I'll post pics in a few.

I went to Lowes last night and picked up two heavy duty 1 1/2" channels, some nuts, bolts, and washers to mount the panels to. This ran me $53 instead of $150 for a prefabricated mounting system.

This morning I went to the welding supply store and got 12' of heavy duty 1/0 welding cable and 16 cable lugs to wire up the battery bank. I also picked up 30' of #4 welding cable (equal to 8 gauge) to wire the panels.

Will write details after lunch

[bwssr]

so, you couldn't have found any wire that fell off one of the company work truck?

;0

[Brazos Hunter]

All they have is solid or heavy stranded that wouldn't work. I wish it would though! Would have saved me $150!

[bwssr]

All they have is solid or heavy stranded that wouldn't work. I wish it would though! Would have saved me $150!

[Brazos Hunter]

Crapatalk isn't letting me upload pics so I'll have to download them to the notebook, upload them to the web, then I can do a writeup. Sorry for the delay.

[91cavgt]

so, you couldn't have found any wire that fell off one of the company work truck?

;0

Wire that works good for A/C power does not work too well for D/C power.


A/C = high voltage low current

D/C = low voltage high current

[Brazos Hunter]

I'm kicking this one back to the top. Just did a bunch of work on mine over the past couple days. Will post pics in a few.

[Brazos Hunter]

Almost done!


Life is too short, live it to its fullest!

~Michael

[Dirtymike]

Great info, thank you for doing this

[MikeP]

Following


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