12-27-2005, 12:19 PM
An interesting topic since we just got our solar stuff working over the weekend! We bought quite a bit of equipment months ago and have had a hard time figuring out how to hook it all up. We have 4 - 64 watt panels. We also have a charge controller that helps the batteries not get overcharged from the panels on really sunny days. We went all out and got the fancy inverter/battery charger. It's an outback 2024 and it was $2,000! It should be able to run a whole house someday. Our 4 - 6 volt batteies connected all together make it a 24 volt system. Each solar panel is 12 volts also, so we had to hook up two together and then bring each set of two into the system. So to add more equipment, we have to get sets of 4 batteries and sets of 2 panels. It's pretty complicated stuff and hard to figure out if you have no clue what you're doing like we did. Finally a friend came over and helped us out. Turns out there was some sort of jumper in the charge controller that needed to be changed from 12 volts (which we used when using only 1 panel and a marine battery) to 24 volts, and our panels were not wired together correctly. Also important is to have a fuse that will blow if lightning hits the panels, at least you won't lose the whole system. The guy that sold us our equipment said that you'd be surprised how many people have lost lots of equipment from lightning. We also have a swith that turns off the whole system in case of a storm or if you are away for awhile and want to turn it all off. Yesterday we were running power tools off of the inverter during the day for short periods of time. It drew the power down while being used, but when we turned them off, it went right back up to 90 percent or so. It's so nice to have the lights on at night with no generator noise! I can also recommend the Honda 3000 EU Generator. It runs super quiet and has an Econo setting that runs even quieter when running small things.