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How much will 5kw panels produce in a day ?

Usangira

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Dec 4, 2020
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Hi,

I am located in Dar es Salaam.
I have setup a 5kw panels with a small power storage of second hand 48V 200Ah lithium battery bank.

I was wondering if I can improve my facility to enable me produce 30 kwh per day if I can invest in storage.
I am currently producing around 14-15 Kwh per day.
 
*I think* He's trying to right-size the output of the panels in his geography in order to determine if he should BUY more batteries or not.

If he buys more storage, will the existing number of panels fill up the new batteries or will it be a waste of money?

@ Usangira - For clarification, what solar charge controllers are you using on your system? Are they being maxed out?

There's no point in buying more batteries if the panels and SCC are already doing the max they can.

If the panels could do more but the SCC is the limiting point, then you could add another SCC or two for the additional storage you would buy.

It might help if you tell us what panels, how they are wired in Series ? parallel and what SCC you are using so we can be on the same page and we don't have to speculate.
 
According to your location with around 11 hours of solar power a 5kW PV system should be able to produce 30kW under sunny conditions, wind my cool off the panels and could go up. In TX with around the same solar power and a 5.23kW Enphase PV system I get on a good hot sunny day around 33kW daily, panels are set at 23 degrees all year around, during very hot summers it drops to around 28-30 kw, which approx 25kW are mostly consumed by the AC unit, during a (24 hour) period, the system is grid tied so around 10-20 kW are sent back to the grid daily, I do have a power wall 5kW, with it's own GTI and 800 watts of panels and it averages 5kW a day and most of it is consumed daily but helps overall and keeps the LiOn batteries charged up.
 
so you have a few things to think about just to make sure the front end is collecting all it can:
1) how efficient are the panels you have when they get hot (are they getting enough cooling?)
2) how are you tracking your panels with regard to the sun? fixed angle, solar tracking, whatever...
3) what are your local enviromental conditions? (smoke, smog, dirt, birds that like to fly over your panels all the time, whatever)
4) do you have sunny space to add lots more panels to jump from 5kw to 30kw

once you know you are getting all you can get out of your panels into your solar charge controller, now its time to think about that!
Until you are sure of how much "real" potential solar power you can collect there is not much point into changing other components.
Once you are sure there is lost power, then you can look at what to do about it based on the loss.
Maybe you just need to get a more efficient SCC?? How efficient is your solar charge controller?
If it looks like a LOT of power is not being captured becaused your batteries are fully charged half way thru the day, then you can look at more storage.

think of the project in stages:
1)how much can I truly collect
2)how efficient can I move the current from the panels, thru the SCC, and to storage
3)how much storage do I need
 
*I think* He's trying to right-size the output of the panels in his geography in order to determine if he should BUY more batteries or not.

If he buys more storage, will the existing number of panels fill up the new batteries or will it be a waste of money?

@ Usangira - For clarification, what solar charge controllers are you using on your system? Are they being maxed out?

There's no point in buying more batteries if the panels and SCC are already doing the max they can.

If the panels could do more but the SCC is the limiting point, then you could add another SCC or two for the additional storage you would buy.

It might help if you tell us what panels, how they are wired in Series ? parallel and what SCC you are using so we can be on the same page and we don't have to speculate.
Thank you guys,

I have 10panels of 500w each. I connected 2 panels in series and 5 parallels. My scc is 100A

My wish is to maximize production and avoid power dumping by scc stopping charging. I want stop worrying energy bills when my ACs are ON.....ha ha ha
 
Thanks for the info. And by chance do you have any type of monitoring on your system that gives you a daily voltage and watt hours generated?

No matter how you slice it with 500w panels you're topping out the SCC. However, buying a 2nd scc to split the wattage to the batteries isn't going to buy you much more either.

But then, let's say you buy another SCC and more batteries anyways, if you can't fully charge them as part of a second or large bank, what's the point of it? If your panels are doing their best and the SCC isn't a limiting factor, and you add more batteries but you suck the juice out as fast as the sun can give it to you, well then . . . gotta pay the man!

Let's run with what DIYSolar123abcOU812 posted and maybe there's an affordable way to squeeze a little more out of what you have to work with.
 
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