| Well, It's been quite a while since my last diary entry. I have done some major changes with my homemade PV system.
Here I finished the room for my batteries, inverter and charge controller. Still have to save some money for more batteries, but that has not been a priority just yet.
My batteries and inverter, I have changed the cabling going from the inverter to the utility/solar switch. I put in a 10AWG cable. It was just a 8m run.
This is the most significant improvement in terms of energy production. I changed my Trace C-35 and installed a C-60 charge controller. Noticeable are also the cables coming from my solar panels. Since my configuration is a 12V and I am 14m away from the solar panels, I had to more than double the cable size. Now I have 2 x 2AWG cable + 1 x 4 AWG cable. It should be the correct size for my setup when I finish installing all the solar panels.
This is a view from all of my solar panels so far. 18 in total, but hoping to install about 6 or 7 more.
Another angle. Noticeable is also the angle of the panels, since I had to compensate for the angle of the sun.
This is the reading of my charge controllers panel. This photo was taken today at about 10:30 in the morning, so no full charge capacity, and the weather was a bit misty. The batteries were also at 13V at that time.
I'm still not at my 40-50 amp capacity and still have to work on a solution on why the 18 panels do not produce more power.
One mayor improvement in the whole configuration was the introduction of shottky diodes, It seemed like some panels (which had whole cells) were cancelling out others which had chipped and broken cells.
But 400Watts for cheaply made panels I think is a good deal, at least enough to energize half of my home for the whole day.
What do you guys (and girls) think?
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