Working on a solar system,,,

   As part of my hurricane preparedness plan, I decided to add a 100watt solar panel to my Dads old cargo_camper_van.  He already had a back up battery installed and ran a 1000watt inverter to that.  The secondary battery was re-charged by the alternator.  This all worked well with the exception being it was gas powered.  So I Thunked on this problem a little further and decided that something renewable was obviously the way to go.  Hence, I procured some previously used roof racks, painted them and we installed a 100watt panel with full success,,,  worked great,,,  except on cloudy days.  On hot days, it wasn't enough to run a high powered fan and freezer at the same time.  Then I got to thinking about hurricane pre-cautions and evac. measures.  That's when I decided to build a solar canopy that ran the full length of the vans roof.  The trick to that was still being able to use the roof racks;  2 sets of roof racks with 3 solar panels @ approx. 735watts,,,  That's when the fun began.
  Fast forward and the solar system is installed and fully functional.  Figuring out the exact measurements for the roof racks and mounting hardware was a real challenge.  And just for nothing, sourcing the material was a good exercise in balancing cost against quality.  Being close to the ocean means that you want to use stainless steel hardware whenever economically possible.  Doing the math on that and it almost always ends up being more cost effective to buy that stuff in multi-packs as oppose to per piece, even if you end up with some left over.  Another hot tip is to utilized inline circuit breakers with reset switches on all the hot wires coming in/out of the busbox combiner box.  If you're running a hot wire from the alternator to the battery bank then you want to put a 150amp inline breaker there as well. {yea, I know, most people have no idea what any of this stuff is, (I wasn't that up on it myself);  Be that as it may, they'll go "WTF did I read about that",,,  when they go to do their own solar system should that day ever arrive for them.}

  Now with all of that new found knowledge, I would humbly suggest to those entertaining the idea of a back-up solar unit;  A 2-panel, 1-charge controller and 1 battery system.  Simple, cheap and easy.  A decommissioned panel like the ones I installed can be purchase for around 50-bucks each.  A used car battery can be found for around 20-bucks.  A brand new charge controller can be gotten from Harbor Freight for another 20.  That leaves a mc4 combiner and cable that can be found cost effectively on Amazon or Ebay.  The entire system is cheaper than a generator and doesn't require a trip to the gas station to run.  If nothing else it's a solid fail safe for around 200 paper money. 
  Now I'm not going to say that Biden's gonna fail, cuz we all know that he's an absolute failure along with his entire administration.  You can't fix stupid;  If you combine that with his ongoing battle with dementia, then you understand why I'm not optimistic about his single term tenure as POTUS.  

 

HEY, YA'LL HAVE A GREAT DAY,,,

     I got some other stuff to wokrs on!!!  smileys-3d.gif

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