I finally got everything together to get these panels in the air. One weekend digging a hole, another planting the pole, the next welding the frame to the satellite dish mount. I bought these four BP sx170s back when I was flush with cash and they've sat unused in my power shed for months. It feels great to get them out in the sun where they belong! The front array is my new (incomplete) one, the rear has been powering my house for the last year.
Today we got the trench dug and wired these over to my first array. Luckily I ran #6 from the first array to the power shed, so the total amps, even with both arrays will be less than 30 @ 48V, which #6 should handle nicely. I had some #8 THHN laying around to wire the second array to the first. The run is less than 30 ft so I should be good there too.
It's funny, once you get used to watching a tracking array do it's thing all day long, it just seems improper for solar panels to not be moving with the sun. The second array is motionless at the moment and it bothers me quite a bit. I have everything I need to wire in the new tracker, except a peanut butter jar! Luckily I queried my neighbor today, and he's willing to scoop out his last bit of peanut butter and donate his jar to my Redrock tracker.
I ended up running wires out from my batteries to both trackers. The Redrok tracker is good to over 30V and my motors are rated at 36V. It seems to work much better than when I tried moving the tracker with a 12V stand-alone system. One thing I did learn when I first started doing this was that my motor liked to go back and forth in short bursts trying to find the ultimate sun angle. Well, Duane has brewed up this optional reverse inhibitor board on his LED3x trackers and the difference was astounding. I just ordered three more of them, for this project, another, and a backup.
I managed to scrounge two identical satellite mounts that use this neat worm gear arrangement. Most of them use a linear actuator, but these will turn much further east and west than a normal mount, and it seems much stronger to me as well.
So here's (almost) the whole silicon farm. 1360W of tracking BP panels at 48V into 24V batteries via an MX60, plus my 400W (optimistic) of homebrew panels, optimized for winter performance at at around 60 degrees fixed. The fixed array is on it's own Xantrex C40.
It's almost time for that Kenmore electric refrigerator. This is a scary time of year to be increasing electrical consumption though. Maybe I can put a bow on it and haul it into the kitchen about Christmas. At least the days are getting longer about then.
Lucky, the cat, got all tired out watching me dig rocks out of the trench today.
