Moar panels
Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2018 11:40 pmDoing some roof repair on the old trailer I now live in. No better time to replace what are nearly the oldest solar panels I own...so...
I had originally planned to put these on two racks of 3, and wire them that way for ~ 90v to the controller, this in part because these are pretty far from the shop where that lives.
However, I may go to 3 racks of two and wired that way, likely unless I change my thinking.
This is "the spot" that gets by far the best sun in winter - when that matters most. The shop is close to the road and there are some trees I can't cut there. No big deal in summer, but...
The thing is, even the trailer would sometimes have just one rack in full sun at some hours, and going down to roof level...there are snow and other issues down there, and sticking up 10 feet is borderline dodgy too. Now, I could wire them in a number of ways, and the controller doesn't care about volts or amps particularly, but if a particular set of 3 panels has to be in sun all at once, well, that's going to be less likely than some pair in most of the permutations.
Then there's ~ a 50' run of #4 wire to consider, and the losses in that. Of course by the time those matter...well, as frugal as I can be with consumption...it's maybe not so important.
At any rate...I made some to-scale cutouts of 2x6x8' lumber and pieced it together "on paper" to see how that looks. The bottom piece is actually the 10' wide roof, and the mount points just under 10' to hit the wall supports...we'll see.
The roof work is because the old tin is beginning to rust, a tree fell on my kitchen and broke some rafters, and a lot of this has idiot-level insulation (someone gave me this building as worthless, which isn't true anymore, but I haven't fixed up *everything* yet. So I bought real high grade metal and some rafter wood, sheathing, tar paper and so on...let's get 'er done before I get old.
This will replace 3-400w of really old stuff with 1500w worth, more or less. I may move the old ones over to another building on campus, along with the batteries I'm replacing (even really good ones get weak in 25 years...).
- 6 new 270w panels, astroenergy
- A little closer
I had originally planned to put these on two racks of 3, and wire them that way for ~ 90v to the controller, this in part because these are pretty far from the shop where that lives.
However, I may go to 3 racks of two and wired that way, likely unless I change my thinking.
This is "the spot" that gets by far the best sun in winter - when that matters most. The shop is close to the road and there are some trees I can't cut there. No big deal in summer, but...
The thing is, even the trailer would sometimes have just one rack in full sun at some hours, and going down to roof level...there are snow and other issues down there, and sticking up 10 feet is borderline dodgy too. Now, I could wire them in a number of ways, and the controller doesn't care about volts or amps particularly, but if a particular set of 3 panels has to be in sun all at once, well, that's going to be less likely than some pair in most of the permutations.
Then there's ~ a 50' run of #4 wire to consider, and the losses in that. Of course by the time those matter...well, as frugal as I can be with consumption...it's maybe not so important.
At any rate...I made some to-scale cutouts of 2x6x8' lumber and pieced it together "on paper" to see how that looks. The bottom piece is actually the 10' wide roof, and the mount points just under 10' to hit the wall supports...we'll see.
The roof work is because the old tin is beginning to rust, a tree fell on my kitchen and broke some rafters, and a lot of this has idiot-level insulation (someone gave me this building as worthless, which isn't true anymore, but I haven't fixed up *everything* yet. So I bought real high grade metal and some rafter wood, sheathing, tar paper and so on...let's get 'er done before I get old.
- Shows panels sideways just to see spacing off roof.
This will replace 3-400w of really old stuff with 1500w worth, more or less. I may move the old ones over to another building on campus, along with the batteries I'm replacing (even really good ones get weak in 25 years...).