Someone asked for a breakdown of my playing with solar costs, so here ya go as well as a bit of a tale about it …

My Solar Costs to Date.

From Amazon:

$ 24.00 (2) 5 Set Terminal Blocks, 600V 25A Dual Row Screw
used to connect in the wires coming in from the solar panels. Maybe not my best idea as if you notice the upper left one on ( https://www.furaffinity.net/view/46420111/ ) you’ll notice the little jumpers they came with get a bit warm – and the max that leg could have gotten from the panels is 13Amps with a short.

$ 88.80 (8) 12V-110V DC Miniature Circuit Breaker, 20 Amp 1 Pole
seen below each meter, cuts power from each solar panel group.

$ 166.80 (8) HiLetgo DC 6.5-100V 0-20A LCD Display Digital
not a ‘must have’ item, but allows you to see the power coming off the roof in volts/amps/watts and watt-hours. Note that these are before the diodes (causes a 0.7 volt lost) so their total will be higher than what the solar controller will report coming in.

$ 8.65 (1) mxuteuk 20Pcs (10Pcs 10A10 + 10Pcs 20A10) Rectifier
only using six of the 20Amp rated diodes. Not mandatory, but reduces power lost from other panels when one panel gets shaded.

$ 150.00 (6) CZC AUTO 1-2-Both-Off Battery Disconnect Switch
used to add/remove the different (now six) battery banks from the charging/inverter circuits.

$ 36.40 (2) SELTERM 4 AWG 3/8" Stud (25 pcs each.)
terminal connections I used when making the heavier connections between the batteries/switches/inverter.

$5040.00 (24) Newpowa 210W(Watts) Solar Panel Monocrystalline
‘12 volt’ solar panels. As the inverter uses 48 volts the panels and batteries were set up in sets of four. (first sixteen panels were set up in pairs so I could run a 24 volt system if I had to.)

$ 10.00 (1) ICI 2 Pieces DIN Rail Slotted Steel Zinc Plated RoHS
just holds the 20 Amp breakers and meters.

$ 20.00 (1) Generic 150 Amp Waterproof Circuit Breaker
breaker between the inverter and the rest of the system.

$ 20.00 (1) Generic 100 Amp Waterproof Circuit Breaker
breaker between the solar controller and batteries/inverter.

$ 106.00 (2) GBGS 32 Pcs Rust Free Solar Panel Mounting
great solar panel mounting set – maybe too good as they’ve been out of stock ever since I got mine …

$8640.00 (24) ECO-WORTHY 12V 100AH LiFePO4 3000+ Cycle
da batteries! Only real down vote from me is the four by four max connection suggested, meaning the biggest battery bank you can build out of them is 20kWhs … (oh – and don’t let them get too cold!)

$ 17.00 (1) 300 Pcs 22-16 16-14 12-10 AWG Insulated Fork Spade
all those little red/blue/yellow connectors you see on the control board.

$ 37.00 (1) KOTTO Battery Cable Lug Crimper Tool 6-50mm²
one of many tools bought to do my little project.

$1968.00 (2) Ampinvt 6000W Peak 18000W Pure
the inverter that turns battery/solar power into something my old house likes.

$ 29.00 (1) Solar PV Crimping Tool for MC3 Cable Connector
more toys/tools

$ 25.00 (1) yarachel 25Pairs / 50PCS Solar Connectors
had to connect all those panels to wires somehow.

$ 600.00 (2) 80 Amp MPPT Solar Charge Controller
the toy that takes the solar power and feeds it to the batteries and inverter without over feeding them. (you can select the max voltage and amperage your type of batteries are fed.)

From my local Lowes hardware store I picked up the rest of what went into my project.

A bench to hold most of the inside stuff ($400).
Wires to connect everything (including two 500 foot spools ($300) of 10 gauge stranded for the solar side – one spool had less than ten feet left on it when the last panels were done!) Lots of other wire sizes for connecting things without causing any fires.

More tools, mainly a ladder and cordless screw drivers to speed up the panel installs.

All told somewhere around $20,000-22,000 to date. (Understand this is just the bits and pieces, if you're paying someone to do it double or triple the cost!)


How this all came about …

A while back most of Texas got to see what real winters look like, and Texas wasn’t ready for it as a lot of power dropped out forcing them to kill power to a lot of people across the state (depending of who you read/believe, at one point Texas was twenty minutes away from losing its entire electrical grid.)

And I have this eighty-plus handicapped mother that it’s sometimes an ordeal getting her to the doctor’s (and where would we go in a possibly weeks-long major blackout anyway?) So, how to better hunker in place rather than running as far as the gas in the car might take us (no power no gas pumps!)

By some bit of luck our power never dropped, though one of my brothers’ homes less than a mile away was over a week getting power restored.

Yes, I could get one of those gas generators, but the noise tells others you have something going – and just how long in hours and days is that gas going to last you?

I did some hunting on Amazon, lots of bits and lots of kits. I should have read a bit deeper and learned more before settling on what bits I got, but hindsight is always 20/20. One thing in my considerations was this was going to be a one-man – okay, one old fart with a bum knee job. So sometimes a selling point was that it wasn’t something that would take two guys to haul around. The 210 watts panels were just over two feet by just over five feet and only twenty-six pounds each. The batteries only twenty-three pounds each. I think the hardest thing was the inverter at sixty-six pounds – most of it on one end!

So with a general idea of what I thought I wanted I started ordering the bits for my little project. I wanted to test each piece before installing things, so the lower half of the bench was set up on the covered back patio with the solar controller/meter/breaker/diode and a battery with a pair of sawhorses held a panel or two out of the grass. As the batteries are shipped at just 30% charge, this let me test panels and controller while charging the batteries. Later four charged batteries were set up to test the inverter before things got set up inside.

One thing that helped with the solar panel installation was already having a metal roof. It’s grounded, so just screwing the panels into it grounded them. Why the wire drop where it is? Attic access is in the garage, so from the access I drove a screw up near the roof cap. Topside the screw showed me the access center and some measuring got me a spot I could drill a hole to run a plastic pipe down that wouldn’t hit any of my air ducking and end up just above one of the cars (so any leaks would drip on the car’s roof rather than some place harder to notice – no leaks to date!)

Plastic electrical piping/couplers protect the wires between the different sets of panels (looking at the roof pictures you can just see the gray pipe running along the top of the panels, that weird bit above the slightly offset pair is three 90 degree pipe bends that I twisted so they’d end where I wanted them to – and was something I could take apart if I ever needed to fish still more wires through them.) Funny fact; other than the pipe going into the roof, none of it is actually anchored to the roof nor glued, just friction fit. We’d had a storm with high winds blow through before I could finish up the finer details – like tying down the wire pipes, but it seems my angles are such the wind just can’t get a good enough grip on things (yes, far more luck than planning!)

A few hooks in the garage ceiling gets the wires to the bench.

Hold My (Root) Beer 1 show off another item from Lowes, a small standard inside house breaker panel. There are two ‘ganged’ 40 Amp breakers and a single 20 amp breaker. The idea was that the right 40 was the 6000 watt inverter powering the house, the 20 was if I was using grid power to recharge the batteries, and the leftmost was if I ever had to use the 2000 watt inverter I’d picked up as a spare. I still haven’t needed/wired the last two options, though I did get (and am running on/testing) a second 6000 watt inverter. The wires going out in the upper left of the breaker box feed into a 40 amp ganged breaker in the house breaker panel (yes, possible overkill on being able to kill power from many places.)

A note for those that might not know, breakers are sized to protect the wires run to them – not the equipment that might be plugged into the sockets. In truth the 40 amp breaker is protecting wire rated over 60 amps, and the max steady draw from the inverter is 25 amps per leg (240 times 25 is your 6000.) likewise on the battery side the max inverter draw is 6600 watts (max 10% wasted/lost in converting) so 137.5 amps at 48 volts. 200 amp rated switches and wiring with a 150 amp breaker cutting off the inverter if the draw gets too high too long; 100 amp breaker to the solar controller though the max out of it should be 80 amps.



Root Beer 2 is getting the wires from the roof organized and fed to the solar controller. The reasoning for just six lines per block was max current from each panel set is 12.5 amps, so six of that type of panel gives you 75 amps to my 80 amp max controller. The upper left is all six positive lines ganging together to head for the controller. Just to the right of that is six 20 amp diodes that prevent a higher voltaged panel from feeding its power to a panel with a lower voltage (more shaded or otherwise blocked.) Why red and brown wires? Because they were out of that size in black wire …

Because the panels were wired in pairs and I needed pairs of pairs, a patch panel paired them up for me (the zip-ties on each pair matched so I could tell who went where.)

Below the patch panel was the negative side of my panels. These feed to meters and then through the breakers before being ganged together for the solar controller.

The way things are wired the meters give me the voltage off the panels before the diodes (which cost my 0.7 volt heading for the controller), and the current from each panel. (Oh, and those meters are powered by the panels, a mere 0.003 amp draw.)

Root Beer 3 shows the meters. Remembering the diodes drop the voltage 0.7 volts, the top meter is only feeding the controller 4.51 amps at 60.43 or 272.5 watts. I’d lose a lot more than five watts if one of the other panel sets became shaded.

Root Beer 4 needs to be updated as there are now six banks of batteries and six switches to control them as well as a second breaker for the other solar controller.

And this comes to one of the places I screwed up and need to rewire my little setup. As I’ve said elsewhere the batteries BMS(Battery Management System) in these batteries don’t like more than 4 sets of 4 batteries ganged together; so I said ‘fine, a 4x4 main set with a 2x4 reserve’, the 1-2 battery switches would be ‘Main-Reserve’ with the second solar controller keeping the backups topped off. So I hooked up my second controller and the readings from both controllers went very wrong. You see all my switching/breakers on the battery side are on the positive lines – but the controllers’ shunts for measuring current/amps are on the negative side, so they’re sharing/halving the current they see going between the solar panels and the batteries! Sadly the ‘easiest’ fix is to move all the switches/breakers to the negative side, which means a bit of rewiring. For now the second controller isn’t hooked to the panels until I buy some more wire and redo a few things.

Root Beer 5 just shows the batteries – to which a second shelf was added and another dozen batteries bringing me up to 24. Currently running four sets with two sets as backup (swapping every few weeks which sets are offline.)

Root Beer 6 is the first sixteen panels, Root Beer 7 the added eight for 24. Best reading this year on a semi-cloudy day was just over twenty kilowatt-hours of power through the controller.

What all this means is that I put too much money and effort into this if all I was trying to do was save on my electric bill! (though the savings should pay it off in 15-18 years …)

But as a backup (which has been needed a couple of times already) the only thing I can’t do is run the A/C and drier (we have two window units we could use sparingly and cord/pins if it comes to that), and enough battery life for a day (maybe two) of really cloudy days.

What does this mean to those thinking about going solar? Not a damn thing. If you just want to save a bit on your bill and get plenty of sunshine grid-solar is a much cheaper investment in watts-per-dollar. If you’re going/playing off-grid games, the first thing you need is a general idea of what your daily power needs are/will be.

I WAGed (Wild Assed Guess) it (8 batteries and 12 panels), got cold feet before putting anything together and added another four each of batteries and panels. Which for the winter months actually worked for me (15kWhs of battery storage and 3360 watts of solar). As things got warmer, the usage went up and any clouds blocking the sun meant switching over to the mains to not risk waking up in the dark.

Oh, and if you don’t know what you’re doing please don’t try to do any of this! At 48 volts you can ‘feel’ it if you are in contact with both ends (yes, I was surprised I’d goofed up!), and higher DC voltages can be even more dangerous than AC; getting ‘bit’ by AC can kick you back/away as the direction of the voltage keeps changing, where as DC can cause you to ‘lock up’ – unable to release it if your were holding a wire when it bit. I was a coward the whole time playing with the solar panel power, covering my ass every way I could (no one else there to save me if I screwed up!)

The floor is open to questions (yes, I already know I'm nuts!)