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Thought about putting this in Beginner's Corner, but I suppose it's more appropriate here. After years, we're finally putting things up on walls. Got our solar shed built this summer, put the 160 pound Quattro 15K on the wall along with one of our MPPTs. Since we could only afford the metal...

It has been years of posting on this forum, realizing I'm an idiot, learning something, then doing something else for a bit and forgetting everything I thought I previously learned, only to be an idiot again and have to re-learn what I thought I knew. Years, and all before we had actually built...

We finally found a solution to keep birds from smacking into our six panels of glass out front. Saw this site about how to make "bird savers" from paracord, but we opted instead to use that design and make vinyl "clings." The view is affected a bit and now it looks like an impressionistic view...

Saw a big shadow of a bird fly right by us a few minutes ago and looked out a side window and saw him in a deadwood tree next to our cabin. I made a call and to my utter surprise he flew over and down from the side of the cabin and landed on our deck right in front of us. Maybe ten feet away...

Hello DIY Solar folks, I'm MrsAlaskanNoob, borrowing his account. You may be familiar with AlaskanNoob's trials and tribulations trying to plan our system here: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/about-to-spend-a-lot-of-money-tomorrow-on-this-system-am-i-making-a-mistake.34259/ Before we go...

About a year ago (or a little more) we bought equipment for a solar install we'd hoped to have installed last summer. But Alaska got record setting rain that Summer...it didn't stop. And it threw a big wrench in our off grid plans. Two of the components we ordered were two Victron Multiplus...

Would love to get one but they seem to be like unicorns. I would rather not buy a Mercedes, but they have the GLE 350de (diesel motor, small battery with about 40 miles of EV only range) but for whatever reason they don't seem to sell the diesel version in the U.S.A. and I don't want to try to...

Got a 600 foot long trench I'm digging, and first thing going in is a fat 250/250/4/0 triplex power cable. I'm hoping to put a fiber optic cable right next to it in the trench, but some things say the steel jacket of the fiber optic might somehow interfere with the power. Haven't seen anything...

Pretty fascinating stuff and it's no wonder music labels are suing Udio claiming copyright violation, not because they have a claim but because Artificial Intelligence is going to crush what little hope an individual musician starting out might have at making money. I toyed around with it a...

Hello all. The wife and I live very off grid in Alaska (helicopter has to deliver stuff) and for the last couple of years we have lived in our 20 foot yurt powered by 16 x 100 watt Renogy panels connected into two separate Yeti 3000s. Even though the yurt location is not great for solar, it...

The biggest draw on our off grid solar array is going to be our hoped for ground source heat pump. I've used a calculator provided to me from a guy who works for Alaska Center for Energy and Power and even though it's for an air source heat pump, he suggested it would give an idea of the energy...

Just sharing for smarter people to discuss. I am much too ignorant to weigh in. But I like to be conservative so in the morning I'm going to power my system down, unplug the batteries and the solar panels. If all seems well late Saturday morning, I'll put the system back online. Gut feeling...

I have no electrical skills and I'm not particularly bright, but I did manage to get the bus bar set up the MPPT, PV, Quattro and the batteries without blowing anything up. And I trenched the solar shed to the cabin 600 feet away and the fiber optic works so I assume the huge power cable will...

We mixed up our first test batch of mortar yesterday. We're using sand we dig up on the property plus bags of cement and rainwater. For the first solar array I mixed up four 94 pound bags of cement and added sand with a 1:3 ratio. The intent is to stop erosion in the trenches I dug in front...

I've got a short cable from each battery to a fuse holder, and then the cable continues from the fuse holder to the bus. I may need to extend my cable lengths though and instead of having long smaller gauge cable for that longer run, I'm wondering if I can keep the smaller gauge short wire to...

I had the impression that DC only required the positive to be wired into the C/B but a guy we hired as a consultant tells us that with voltage that high, we should use a 2 pole C/B and wire positive and negative through it. Of course we bought 7 single pole ones already for our 7 strings of...

Unless there is an easier way, I plan to connect a Raspberry Pi to the Cerbo GX Relay #1 and hopefully provide the 5V of power it needs. The intent is: a) when Cerbo sees battery bank at 40% it will energize the generator auto start relay b) that relay will then power the Pi c) the Pi will...

Alright, maybe a 48V bus bar shouldn't kill me, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that I'd try wiring a solar string directly to it... Anyway, I'm trying to finalize the cable lengths for the Quattro and MPPT connecting to the bus bar before I put in the order. I set my Quattro 4"...

Finally putting these blue boxes on the wall. Precious little info on mounting this super heavy Quattro 15K though. It comes with some screws for the bracket (though we're missing one) and it has side bolts that bolt through side part of the bracket into the Quattro. I'm just wondering, with...

Apparently, at least in the UK, there is some concern about using DC isolators with solar panels as a fire risk despite isolators being required. Haven't looked much into this new development. I guess there has been a rash of fires lately and this is one of the new recommendations, to not have...

I see combiner boxes that will take strings of PV and combine them, in parallel, onto one wire. Is there a box on the other side that can split that back into several wires per string to plug into several MPPTs?

About to leave the homestead for a bit and I'm going to shut down the system because I haven't yet insulated the shed where my batteries are in. But I had the bright idea of connecting my Cerbo (everything else off) to this string of 4 x 12V lithium wired up in series for a 48V bank, just so I...

Pour a little slab, build a little shed over it, and plumb a 500 gallon diesel tank into it. Maybe have the big diesel tank gravity feed into a smaller buried tank so that the earth warms it up or something. Probably won't do that initially and we'll see how it goes. Only gets to about -10F...

Guy who made my negative cables for our MPPT that will deliver 200A at 48V to the bus ended up a little short on one of them. Half inch shorter than the other. He said it wouldn't be a big deal. I'm going to end up taking one back and getting it replaced because he put the lugs 180 out on the...

Right now I have an AC generator powering an EG4 chargeverter which is wired into the DC bus. The chargeverter allows setting the voltage and amperage. I'm thinking about replacing this with a DC generator tied directly into the DC bus. The load on it (outside the inverter demand) will be 8 x...

Anybody know why the main PV section of Venus is showing about 200W more PV than what the MPPT is reporting getting? My only guess is that the MPPT is taking the DC loads (which are around 200W or so) out of what it's reporting, and the "PV Charger" of the main screen isn't subtracting DC...

I am completely off grid with no generator hooked up to the inverter. I have a Quattro 15K and an MPPT RS 450/200 in my solar shed, and the Quattro AC output goes to an AutoTransformer and from there to the AC distribution panel. The AC side of things is grounded (the electrician did it). But...

I've got an MPPT that can push 200A to my 48V lithium batteries. But it will push at higher than 48V to charge the batteries, so I'm assuming the breaker between my MPPT and batteries should be rated for 60VDC? Local solar shop sold me 48V 200A breakers and I only realized it after the fact...

Apparently the cables supplied by Pylontech for their batteries are only rated for about 100 amp and the terminal connectors for about 130amp. I'm going to have 400 amp going into the batteries from the Lynx Distributors for charging (2 SCCs that put out 200 amp each). Apparently a solution to...

Saw Will's video on these dirt cheap batteries. The 300AH ones are out of stock, so I'm looking at 12 of the 200AH ones to be charged by a Victron 450/200. I just want to make sure I could wire these up into a 48V battery bank and charge them efficiently with the SCC. Any issues if I connect...

I'm assuming PV puts out whatever power it can put out to the MPPT (and that it's not based on a demand set by the MPPT) and the MPPT then clips power it doesn't need (if the batteries are full and there is no inverter demand). If that assumption is correct, where does the extra power go that...

Saw a couple videos of people welding receivers on the blades of their mini-ex to haul trailers. Anybody done something like this? If so, how did you calculate trailer size for your excavator?

I see the chargeverter shows battery voltage and that increases as the battery is being charged and it shows current (you set what current you want to go to the battery). My question is...if I'm charging a battery with a BMS that starts to limit the current as it gets full, will that be...

I'm trying to put my t-fuses in the t-fuse holder and if I'm reading this spec sheet correctly, I'm supposed to only torque the t-fuse to .34NM? My torque wrench min torque is 60 inch pounds, so if this is really the number I'm going to have to figure something out. That number seems so low...

Batteries just charged up to full and the MPPT went from throttling from 6KW coming in to just a few watts as the batteries requested less, and then it stopped charging and started showing -16W for some reason. If we turn on a bigger AC load the MPPT then starts supplying power. But I'm trying...

MPPT puts out 100A to a single battery connected to the bus with a positive and negative cable. Is it 100A going through both cables, or 50A going through each to the battery?

The VOC after temp correction is 247V and I have a long run of 350 feet to the MPPT. Does it pass the smell test that I would need 1 AWG wire to make that happen? Many thanks in advance for any help...

Anybody got one? I've seen some electric ATVs that have been put on the market, but I'm not sure any can handle tracks and we need tracks where we're at. Argo (which is our daily driver) has an electric model but it's super expensive and unfortunately they didn't use individual motors on each...

The lugs for the Pylontech 4AWG cables won't fit on the large bus bar terminals. But the Blue Sea Power Bar 1000 has these smaller terminals. I would be connecting 8 of these 4AWG cables to the bus bar, only one shown here. Each Pylontech cable will carry a max of 100A in this 48V system...

Trying to make sure I get the correct circuit breaker to protect wires, but ampacity changes with cable temperature. I saw some NEC reference that I think indicates 60C should be used as the ampacity of the cable. But cable listing I'm looking at only provides ampacity for 40C, so I'm not sure...

I've got 8 x US5000, 4 long positive cables, and 4 long negative cables (same lengths in either scenario). The question is where to put those cables in the battery bank. The network cables will talk to the system and treat it as one big battery bank of 8 regardless, from what I understand, but...

I've got to cut some 130 foot 10 AWG wires for an install, just want to make sure they're actually equal length. Any tricks anybody use for this? I saw a device called a CutFox 10 that is a machine that does this (not sure if it would do 130 foot length or not) but haven't seen any reviews of...

How to avoid Victron capacitors from rushing batteries when setting up???? I thought I had got everything set up to avoid the Victron MPPT RS capacitors and the Victron Quattro capacitors from demanding a massive in rush from my "battery bank." I bought a light bulb to use as a resistor and used...

The PV wire we have purchased and see online is 10 AWG 7 strand, or 19 strand wire. But Victron requires Class K PV wire to go into its MPPT RS units. I have found Class K 10 AWG wire (tinned copper) -- would I be okay slapping some MC4 connectors on it and using it as my PV wire? Wire specs:

We have a Honda 7000 generator (North American) that puts out 120/240 with a 4 prong connection. I assume that is putting out two hots of 120V to make the 240V. From what I understand this generator is not grounded if that matters to this scenario. And I"ll set the Quattro Hz to the North...

I think this is okay, but figured I'd check with the collective expertise before I start modifying this thing. My Victron MPPT RS 450/200 uses two sets of DC cables to connect to the bus. And it has an access slot that is just a bit too narrow for these 4/0 cables. My questions are: a) any...

Continuing my habit of learning something new after I make expensive decisions on what I think I know... I have seven arrays of 7 x LG440N2T-E6 bifacial panels in series, with each array connected into a tracker of two MPPT RS 450/200 units. When I sized the arrays, then designed ground mounts...

Anybody know of a company that sells custom bus bars? I'd like to get a 24 terminal tin plated copper bus bar made by somebody who knows what they're doing.

So we've got our 8 Pylontech batteries in our solar shed which is located above a root cellar. Turns out the Alaska winters laugh at my attempt to insulate the batteries. So I'm going to move them down into the root cellar with room to double them, into a super insulated wood shelf. The shelf...

We are almost ready to install our completely off grid, and to remain off grid, solar system. We own and will implement everything in the system as is, according to the design below, with the exception of the Multiplus II 48/15000 shown in the top left of our diagram (we planned to order it but...