I probably wouldn't have done any of this if it wasn't for that cyclone we had last year that knocked out power for 4 days. Because of that, I wanted to have access to power when the grid goes down. Something to power a small fridge, lights, radio and TV gear. A work in progress, this is where I'm at in this point in time.
The solar panels...
Never mind the microphone stand turnstile antenna for NOAA weather satellites.
The highest power panel here is a Powertech monocrystalline 80 watt panel, the largest in size is a heavy 14kg thin film "amorphous" 40 watt panel.
These are professionally angled by using flowerpots...
And bricks.
Rather than clad the house in vinyl cladding, I'm going to cover it in solar panels.
For western Sun there is a panel facing west. It came from the dump and doesn't work so good lol.
Same for the eastern Sun.
This parallel array all wired up produces about 300 watts at 12 volts. Each panel has schottky diodes to prevent backfeed from sunlit panels to the shaded ones.
The various panels are fed into this expandable combiner box before going to the solar controller - regulator.
From there it's fed into the regulator via some analog amp meters.
Continued...
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