New Project!

Chapter One, In Which Uncle Joel Carries Heavy Objects and Does Scary Things With Electricity.

The real heavy lifting has already been done by W, who signed a contract with a solar electric company and wrote a check with more zeroes than are contained in Fritz's I.Q. - except that the amount on the check contained numbers other than zero.

Delivered yesterday - by which I mean, we loaded them onto a truck and then unloaded them into the power shed - were four brand-new six-volt batteries and four 200-watt solar panels. That's more generating power than is contained in the whole existing panel array, by quite a stretch. Other gadgetry is coming.

One of the many things wrong with the existing system is that the inadequate solar collectors were attempting to charge sixteen of these 12-volt batteries. When I disconnected eight of them a couple of months ago, cutting the supposed storage capacity in half, the system actually improved. Slightly. These batteries are shot, and who could blame them.

So...step one was to take the old batteries right off-line and replace them with a much smaller bank of four six-volt batteries. Eventually, of course, we'll have to increase the size of the bank but this is as far as the money went. They're wired in series, giving us the same 24 volts. One major improvement - all these batteries work.

The first thing I learned a few months ago, when M and I disconnected all the batteries for testing, is that the battery circuit in this system

HAS!

NO!

CIRCUIT!

BREAKER!!

Also no big scary knife switch, no way of disconnecting the circuit AT ALL that doesn't involve a wrench. Turning the inverter off before monkeying with the connections doesn't help at all, because somewhere in there is a big-ass capacitor. Arky Sparky! Uncle Joel Not Like.

But this was reasonably painless: At least this time I was ready for it. The retrofit will, of course, have a circuit breaker but for now we have what we have. I disconnected the old bank, salvaged as many cables as I needed, and re-wired the bank with these new batteries.

I also, in the process, found a bad connection coming off the fuse that may have been caused while I was jerking cables around this morning, but which I suspect was there all along and couldn't have been helping a thing.

These are the new solar panels, which you can barely see because right now the power shed is a little cramped for space. Sorry.

And this is where they need to go. Uncle Joel won the fierce bidding to be the one who figured out how to get 13' of solar panels to fit on a 9' roof, and then actually do that. (Translation: Uncle Joel was drafted.) How's that going to work? Stay tuned; I'm interested in the answer to that myself.

This is what we've got now. The new 800 watt array will not in itself be adequate, so we're still going to use these. But part of the problem with the existing system is that the panels are mis-matched, and just tying four more mis-matched panels into the existing array wouldn't be a big help. So we're still going to use these, but add a separate charge controller for the new panels giving us two arrays working more-or-less independently in a manner that probably makes perfect sense to the new system designer and God, but which is absolute Greek to me.

The good news: All I need to supply is the grunt work. An installer's going to do all the thinkum and make it all work.