Building a small scale solar array

With the main solar array on its way to being online by early next year, we needed power sooner than that inside the workshop. With all of the lights set up and electrical cables ran through the building I wanted to power them so we can work with the doors closed when its cold or hot. With all that insulation added to the building its quite nice inside when we keep the doors closed, but its so dark we can hardy work inside. Long term, with the main solar array I am building it will indeed power all of the buildings here on the homestead. But in the mean time I set up a small solar rig to power my workshop.

With three 100w panels running in parallel and three 100Ah deep cycle 12V batteries running in parallel its a small setup. But I can now power a few things in the workshop until I get the much more powerful main array online.

Using special harnesses I join the three panels together, raising their current potential while keeping their voltage the same. I tried using one of my spare 450w 34v panels but it was too powerful so I had to get three smaller panels instead that run at a lower voltage. So going with three joined together seems to be the way to go.

The wiring enters a water resistant box, wire glands are at the bottom while all the wires are ran in. Inside is the solar charge controller and 120V AC inverter.

The panels are ziptied to a 2x4 frame and then we tied the frame down to the structure I built to hold the panels and batteries. The weight at the bottom keeps it from being blown over easily. Each battery weighs 63 pounds, and I have 3 of them.

The goal was to run the main shop lights, or at least a couple of them. And I can, but only for about ten minutes when there is no power recharging the panels. If I have light outside on the panels outside it adds much more and I would expect the lights to stay on for an hour or longer.

These two switches controls all of the lights or just the three back by where the workbenches will be placed. I cannot power all the overhead lights at once, as that uses close to a kilowatt and my system is only rated up to around 400W. I would need to more than double my setup and run thicker wires. So its just not worth it, will wait until the main array is online to power all the lights.

During the winter the output of the sun is lower, but I still think we can capture a lot of power using these.

Just happened to be a partly cloudy day while testing, but I am curious on a bright sunny day how long I can run bigger loads for. The inverter turns off when the batteries reach 10.5V which is nice, but they are deep cycle batteries so its not as big as a concern depleting them.

Smaller appliances such as this bed lamp can pretty much run constantly. It uses less than 100W but it does not make all that great of a shop lamp. So I ordered a 100w LED workshop lamp I hope to use soon once it arrives.

As for a light to stop me from tripping over things in the dark it works great for that.

The proof of concept works, just need to be aware of its limits until we have the much large solar array all going. @makinstuff should be back early next year to wrap up the setup along with his friend so I am looking forward to that. But until then we have limited power in the workshop, which is a lot better than no power at all. And knowing I can build something like this it would be a great addition to a small structure that just needs a little power every so often. Looking forward to building more of these as they are pretty much portable and self contained from the elements.

Posted with STEMGeeks