New solar panel

[fungus]

Just wired this all in, and tidied up my wiring a bit yesterday, it's a nice big 60w mono panel, I'm typing this on solar energy powering my laptop It only takes about 15w and the panels will pretty easily do that if there's just a little bit of sun, got 96w in total now .. Need to bolt it down properly to another frame, was just putting it out on the frame for the other panels for testing.

Up on the roof:



Wiring:



Connectors at the top, junction box for the amorphous panels and the MC connectors for the new one, it came with some nice long ~10ft cables with connectors on one end which was useful:



Output, I've seen up to 6A:



Thought I might as well include a quick pic of me

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

When you mount the panel be sure to give it a little space underneath for cooling air to circulate.

[DamonHD]

Good stuff!

I kinda wish I had a good old-fashioned ammeter somewhere in my off-grid system!  I never know how many amms I've bagged...

Rgds

Damon

[Capt Slog]

These are good fun Damon.......

http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_experiments_ammeter.html

I made one built onto an acrylic sheet so that everything moving is "behind the glass" so to speak.  I used a piece of carbon fibre rod for the pointer and wired a tiny led to the to to act as a pointer that I can see from yars away.

Ok, it's not particularly accurate, but you can certainly see the amps going in and it's quite robust.

.

[DamonHD]

Yes, very tempting!

Rgds

Damon

[ghurd]

Nice!

I wondered what you have been up to.

G-

[DamonHD]

Oh, he's quite likely to be throwing rocks at me in London tomorrow during my last few days working in the City.  B^>

(There's a protest "Climate Camp" due starting sort-of tomorrow.)

I don't suppose it'll cut much ice that I'm leaving to work on renewables!

Rgds

Damon