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My DIY 60 kW 220 panel setup

crazydane

Solar Enthusiast
Joined
Sep 3, 2022
Messages
68
I just joined the forum a few days ago, but have been doing solar since fall of 2016. I figured I'd share the journey with you guys.

I started out with 80 panels with micro inverters (Ubiquiti SunMax inverters and panels). 56 of them went on my shop roof and the other 24 on a ground mount array.

Lots of boxes from Ubiquiti:

sunMAX-03.JPG

sunMAX-04.JPG

I made a rig for my tractor to bring each panel up onto the roof:

sunmax-11-4-01.JPG

Next up was doing the 24 panel ground array next to the shop building:

groundmount11-28-01.JPG

groundmount12-4-02.JPG

80 panels is good, but why not add 48 more? :)

axitec-01.JPG

This time I went with 280 watt Axitec panels, but still used SunMax 250W micro inverters. 2 more 24 panel ground mount arrays:

hillsidearrays-10.JPG

But before bringing them online, I had the POCO come out and upgrade my transformer from a 25 VKA to a 50 KVA:

50kva-03.JPG

So at this point I had a total of 128 panels, all using Micro Inverters. Each AC string had between 12 and 14 panels and went to a 20A breaker in a dedicated 200A soler sub-panel:

200A_Solar_Sub-panel.JPG

Next I decided to do a 32 panel ground mount array using a SMA SB 7.7. Don't have any construction pics, but here's the completed array:

IMG_1693.JPG

Next I build a pole barn with the roof consisting of 45 panels.
 
Pole barn outer frame done:

pole_barn_3.jpg

Done:

pole_barn_5.jpg

View from inside:

pole_barn_6.jpg

That one was a mix of another SMA SB 7.7 and 9 more SunMax micro inverters.

I then decided I should have added just one more row along the bottom:

IMG_1511.JPG

pole_barn_7.jpg

Areal view prior to adding the bottom row to the pole barn:

solar_panels_future2.jpg

Prior to starting this project, I had 400A service to the house and well as to the shop. Since the solar was going to mainly feed the house and back feed into the grid, I had to get rid of the shop 400A service and connect the shop to the house. So after having the service disconnected at the house and having the POCO drop the 500 MCM cables from the pole. I very carefully dug them out of the ground the 200' run between the pole and shop building. Next I dug a trench between the shop and house, which just happened to also be 200'. After dropping in the 3 500 CMC cables, I also dropped in a 2/0 for ground, since the whole system was only going to have a single place where N and G were bonded, which was the house.

I left the 400A meter base at the shop building and used it as a junction box. I picked up my own meter to put in there as opposed to using a pair of door hinges to bridge the gap. Since the bonding is at the house, I had to lift neutral in the meter base and then used a pair of Polaris connectors to tie N and G to where they needed to go (200A shop sub-panel and 225 solar sub-panel). So it then looked like this:

IMG_1736.JPG
At the house, the POCO gave me a new meter base and I purchased a 400A fused disconnect and a 400A automatic transfer switch. Here they are with the way I ended up wiring them:

400-Trio-Wire-Layout.JPG

The next part was tricky. I installed the new meter base onto the house along with the disconnect and ran the feeder from the shop up into the disconnect. I also had to dig up the live feed to the house and keep it powered until I got the transfer switch installed.

House400A-9-21-03.JPG

The 500 MCM was just shy of being able to reach into the disconnect switch, so I added some 350 MCM Cu to get it the last few feet:

House400A-9-20-06.JPG
 
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The next day the POCO came out and killed the power to the house, and moved the cables from the pole into the new meter base and energized the new panel and left. It then took me about 3 hours to mount the transfer switch and run new 3/0 Cu to the sub-panels in the house. Bending 3/0 Cu is no fun at all, although it was not nearly as bad as the 300 MCM feeding the solar sub-panel.

House400A-9-26-02.JPG

Next I decided to pour a pad and make a "power room" where the service enters the house.

House400A-10-9-03.JPG

Structure done:

kubotahome-01.JPG

The roll of cable is a 24 strand fiber cable that I ran down to the shop building since I had ditch dug anyway.

20 kW Kubota generator installed and wired:

kubotainpowerroom-08.JPG

Last month I decided to ditch all the micro inverters and go 100% SMA SB string inverters. Doing all the ground mounted arrays was easy since I had easy access to the inverters, but the 56 panels on the roof were a different story.

I hauled a pallet up onto the roof, got it level, and the moved the top row of each array section onto it, and then shifted the remaining panels in each row, up one:

IMG_1837.JPG

Inside the shop, I build a frame to hold all the inverters along with the 225A sub-panel. Here's a shot from when the shop roof arrays were still on micro inverters:

IMG_1767.JPG

All done:

IMG_E1848.JPG

Closeup of solar sub-panel:

IMG_E1844.JPG

Getting that 300 MCM Cu cable to make the turn into the 225A breaker was a real challenge!

All PV wire going into the inverters are 10 AWG and the A/C output of the inverters going to the sub-panel is 6 AWG. The feeder wire from the solar sub-panel to the converted 400A shop meter base is 300 MCM Cu.

Output when the sun is out:

SME output 8_11_22_01.jpg

Production for the last 30 days:

monthly solar production 9_4_22.jpg
 
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Lol, yeah, I'm pretty addicted you could say. Looking at my usage, I'm almost where I need to be now, but winter is coming... Last 30 days:

monthly site consumption 9_4_22.jpg

House consumes an average of about 100 kWh a day, and the shop building around 200 kWh. The reason the shop consumed to much is that I run crypto mining rigs there during the summer. In the winter, I move them up into the house and they provide all the heat I need, so I don't have to run my heat pump at all, no matter how cold it gets outside.

Here's a daily plot from all 8 inverters from 8/28 when it was mostly sunny:

solar_8_28_2022.jpg

I do have shading on one of the arrays in the AM as can be seen from the bottom graph that all of a sudden jump up at around 11:30 when the sun is able to hit the entire panel. The array with the shade is the lower of the two hillside ones. The upper one is casting a share on the lower one. I'm kicking myself now for not realizing that was going to be the case when I placed the poles for the arrays. But live and learn I suppose.

Since I have maxed out the 50 KVA transformer, and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to convince the POCO to upgrade me again (it was free the first time since I was mining a lot more and pulling close to 25 kW during the winter and summer was coming, which meant even more power draw once I started running the AC).

My next project will be to take the house semi-off grid. What I mean by that, is to get 4x of the EG4 6500s along with maybe 30 kWh worth of battery storage, and then wire it up as follows:

wiring diagram.jpg

If the grid goes down (and it does at least a couple of times a year and last for several hours or even days), when the house can run on batteries and the generator can kick in when the batteries get low to charge them back up given how I plan to wire in the 6500s per the above diagram.

Since the EG4 inverters are not grid tired, I don't have to worry about pushing the 50 KVA transformer past its limit. Using opensolar.com, I believe I'll be able to fit 53 455 watt panels into the roof of the house:

open_solar.jpg

With 4 EG$ 6500s, I'll have 8 MPPT inputs, so that should work out pretty well with the 53 455 watt panels giving me around 24 kW.

I live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and really enjoy the views. Here's a shot from the house looking down at the arrays surrounding the shop:

Shop rear view.JPG

Wife feels the solar arrays ruin the view, but I think they are beautiful, lol.
 
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Beautiful work except one minor detail that will come up in the future. You're concrete will crack with the steel pipes going through it over time due to contraction/expansion with temperature fluctuations between the two dissimilar properties that will make that a waste of time and the wood framed solar panel racks will rot the wood posts right where the concrete and wood are at the surface. Hope the frost line is shallow too...
 
Beautiful work except one minor detail that will come up in the future. You're concrete will crack with the steel pipes going through it over time due to contraction/expansion with temperature fluctuations between the two dissimilar properties that will make that a waste of time and the wood framed solar panel racks will rot the wood posts right where the concrete and wood are at the surface. Hope the frost line is shallow too...
Yeah, I think I would have gone sonotubes with brackets if I were to go wood. I don't trust wood in the ground much less in concrete. Gone are the days of great CCA treated. Might be ok out west...not in my neck of the woods (Missouri with lots of clay). Any wood that I do put in the ground gets wrapped in high quality sticky roofing material around the ground level (some below, some above). And lots of crushed rock at the bottom for water to weep into. I'm switching to reject steel for fencing - along with a Hypertherm Powermax30 AIR plasma coupled with a Lincoln SA 300.

The rest of the setup and design was awesome though.
 
I just joined the forum a few days ago, but have been doing solar since fall of 2016. I figured I'd share the journey with you guys.

I started out with 80 panels with micro inverters (Ubiquiti SunMax inverters and panels). 56 of them went on my shop roof and the other 24 on a ground mount array.

Lots of boxes from Ubiquiti:

View attachment 110442

View attachment 110443

I made a rig for my tractor to bring each panel up onto the roof:

View attachment 110444

Next up was doing the 24 panel ground array next to the shop building:

View attachment 110445

View attachment 110446

80 panels is good, but why not add 48 more? :)

View attachment 110448

This time I went with 280 watt Axitec panels, but still used SunMax 250W micro inverters. 2 more 24 panel ground mount arrays:

View attachment 110449

But before bringing them online, I had the POCO come out and upgrade my transformer from a 25 VKA to a 50 KVA:

View attachment 110450

So at this point I had a total of 128 panels, all using Micro Inverters. Each AC string had between 12 and 14 panels and went to a 20A breaker in a dedicated 200A soler sub-panel:

View attachment 110453

Next I decided to do a 32 panel ground mount array using a SMA SB 7.7. Don't have any construction pics, but here's the completed array:

View attachment 110454

Next I build a pole barn with the roof consisting of 45 panels.
Wow Fantastic setup! Well done.

You are definitely different than most new members who come here.

Most New Members say “ I bought all this stuff now will it work? and how do I make it work?”

Love the view too. You look to be almost by yourself up there. It’s beautiful.

What miners are you using and what Algorithm?More importantly what Pool are you using so I can stay away ?.
Seriously though 25 kw just for miners? Wow..

I mined BTC back in 2010 before the difficulty went through the roof.
I saw the writing on the wall then.
Had to sell all the coins and upgrade miners to stay competitive or get out..

I got out then but kick myself daily for doing so.
Lost a fortune when Mt GOX folded. Still trying to get that back.
 
Yeah, I figure the wood in the concrete won't last forever, but I'm hoping to get 20+ years out of it, but who knows. I do have lots of gravel in the bottom of each hole, and in the case of the pole barn, it is on pretty sloped ground, so I'm hoping water will drain quickly. Frost line here in central Virginia is about 2 feet. All wood and steel posts are down 3+ feet.

Good tip about wrapping wood in sticky roofing material, I'll definitely keep that in mind if I do another project involving wood going in the ground. I purchased this property in 1999 and have several projects I did back then with wood in the ground that is still seem solid. Like this wooded privacy fence using 4x4 treated posts set directly in concrete:

fence13.JPG

fence16.JPG

So far it has been standing for 19 years and survived plenty of storms. But maybe the wood treatment was a lot better back then than today as you mentioned?

As for crypto, I started back in the summer of 2017 since I already had the initial 80 panels up and running for about 6 months and was building up an excess of kWh in my account. Timing was good and got up to around 80 GPUs at the peak (mostly 1080Tis back then). I was also running several AntMiner S9s.

I sold mined coins as I went along to fund the solar expansion as well as to buy more GPUs. If I had held into everything, I would have mined about 30 BTC by now. But of course that would have meant a lot less solar today, and a smaller mining farm. I did mine throughout the very low earning period during 2018, which work out well for me since difficulty was very low.

I sold all my Nvidia 1000 series GPUs back in the fall of 2020, and replaced them with 3080s and 3090s and earlier this year, added 3080Tis as well. Also have a few 3060s, 3060Tis, 3070s and 3070Tis. Picked up 16 5070XTs back in 2020 when I sold the 1000 series cards. Those have been great on ETH over the last 2 years. I sold 8 of them a few months back for the same that I paid for them. They probably ROI'ed at least twice during that period.

It will be very interesting to see what happens on the 15th when ETH goes POS. I plan to continue to mine through the projected very low profitability period once again, being optimistic that things will turn around again like is has in all the previous cycles. This is why I'm trying to ensure I can do it with little to no electrical cost.

I currently have about 3 GH pointed at ethermine.org, but am ready to switch to other coins on the 15th, depending on how things play out.
 
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...and I thought I was a solar addict needing enrolled in a program. Some of your lowest output days are my average...60 kWh. Max for me was 125kWh. That is a nice system! My wife loves our 48 panel solar array, 30' behind the house on the south facing hill and supports my addiction.
 
The next day the POCO came out and killed the power to the house, and moved the cables from the pole into the new meter base and energized the new panel and left. It then took me about 3 hours to mount the transfer switch and run new 3/0 Cu to the sub-panels in the house. Bending 3/0 Cu is no fun at all, although it was not nearly as bad as the 300 MCM feeding the solar sub-panel.

View attachment 110474

Next I decided to pour a pad and make a "power room" where the service enters the house.

View attachment 110475

Structure done:

View attachment 110476

The roll of cable is a 24 strand fiber cable that I ran down to the shop building since I had ditch dug anyway.

20 kW Kubota generator installed and wired:

View attachment 110477

Last month I decided to ditch all the micro inverters and go 100% SMA SB string inverters. Doing all the ground mounted arrays was easy since I had easy access to the inverters, but the 56 panels on the roof were a different story.

I hauled a pallet up onto the roof, got it level, and the moved the top row of each array section onto it, and then shifted the remaining panels in each row, up one:

View attachment 110479

Inside the shop, I build a frame to hold all the inverters along with the 225A sub-panel. Here's a shot from when the shop roof arrays were still on micro inverters:

View attachment 110481

All done:

View attachment 110483

Closeup of solar sub-panel:

View attachment 110484

Getting that 300 MCM Cu cable to make the turn into the 225A breaker was a real challenge!

All PV wire going into the inverters are 10 AWG and the A/C output of the inverters going to the sub-panel is 6 AWG. The feeder wire from the solar sub-panel to the converted 400A shop meter base is 300 MCM Cu.

Output when the sun is out:

View attachment 110485

Production for the last 30 days:

View attachment 110486
Lol, yeah, I'm pretty addicted you could say. Looking at my usage, I'm almost where I need to be now, but winter is coming... Last 30 days:

View attachment 110487

House consumes an average of about 100 kWh a day, and the shop building around 200 kWh. The reason the shop consumed to much is that I run crypto mining rigs there during the summer. In the winter, I move them up into the house and they provide all the heat I need, so I don't have to run my heat pump at all, no matter how cold it gets outside.

Here's a daily plot from all 8 inverters from 8/28 when it was mostly sunny:

View attachment 110490

I do have shading on one of the arrays in the AM as can be seen from the bottom graph that all of a sudden jump up at around 11:30 when the sun is able to hit the entire panel. The array with the shade is the lower of the two hillside ones. The upper one is casting a share on the lower one. I'm kicking myself now for not realizing that was going to be the case when I placed the poles for the arrays. But live and learn I suppose.

Since I have maxed out the 50 KVA transformer, and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to convince the POCO to upgrade me again (it was free the first time since I was mining a lot more and pulling close to 25 kW during the winter and summer was coming, which meant even more power draw once I started running the AC).

My next project will be to take the house semi-off grid. What I mean by that, is to get 4x of the EG4 6500s along with maybe 30 kWh worth of battery storage, and then wire it up as follows:

View attachment 110494

If the grid goes down (and it does at least a couple of times a year and last for several hours or even days), when the house can run on batteries and the generator can kick in when the batteries get low to charge them back up given how I plan to wire in the 6500s per the above diagram.

Since the EG4 inverters are not grid tired, I don't have to worry about pushing the 50 KVA transformer past its limit. Using opensolar.com, I believe I'll be able to fit 53 455 watt panels into the roof of the house:

View attachment 110495

With 4 EG$ 6500s, I'll have 8 MPPT inputs, so that should work out pretty well with the 53 455 watt panels giving me around 24 kW.

I live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and really enjoy the views. Here's a shot from the house looking down at the arrays surrounding the shop:

View attachment 110503

Wife feels the solar arrays ruin the view, but I think they are beautiful, lol.
Great setup.
Thanks for the information.
Why did you drop the micro - inverters?
 
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Wow, what an awesome setup, thanks for sharing, ur a literal PowerHouse in more ways than one. Well done.
I think its called “Serious OCD”. Cheers
 
I dropped the micro-inverters because they had a pretty high failure rate and replacing the ones on the shop roof was a huge pain. Also, I don't really have any shade issues except for that one array that sees shade in the am during summer. I think the overall efficiency is better with the string inverters as I'm running about 400 VDC as opposed to 250 VAC for the runs to the inverters.

I think I have talked myself out of adding panels to the roof on the house. The shingles there are coming up on 25 years, so I would be forced to change them out too. I'd rather put that off for a while longer. Besides, I barely have any south facing roof surface on the house.

So instead, I'm thinking I'd add a 48 ish panel array here:

IMG_E2022.JPG

Sat view:

googleearth.jpg

It would be a fairly short DC run to the "power room", and they would out of view given how steep the slope is there.

Give how steep the slope there is, I'd love to go with single pole mount for each array and then have more than 2. Like maybe 4 of 12 panels each, or 6 with 8 panels each. Are there any reasonably priced single pole mounts out there?

This would be a project for next year as I've maxed out my federal tax credit for this year with the string inverter upgrade and that extra row of 15 panels on the pole barn.
 
Sounds great, look forward to it. If ur thinking about single pole mounts, would it take too much engineering to make them tracking types?, with maybe a couple of electric actuators or a heavy threaded type rod to make them automatically track the sun, or even a cable/chain arrangement that attaches to each side of the panel array & does a few loops around a motor spindle 45-75 degrees down the pole from panel array for tilting array, or a combination of both methods for true tracking. You would need a fairly beefy type of swivel attachment for full tracking, or perhaps just a decent bush or bearing arrangement for basic left to right tracking Like a see-saw type system. I dont know if you would consider the extra work & engineering worth the gain in ur situation, but it would make for a great review of ur systems capabilities. Look forward to ur updates. Cheers
 
I actually have an old dual axis STS tracker. It was used to track a 12' satellite dish from back when those were a thing. It is very stout and mounts on a 4" diameter pole. One day I'll see about mounting 6-8 panels to it and figured out how to control the motors in it to track the sun. Should be a fun project.

Since I'm limited by the capacity of the 50 KVA transformer to the grid, another thought I had, was that I could install panels on the hillside facing East and West, kind of like what this guy did:

east_west_panels_1.jpg

east_west_panels_2.jpg

Mounting would be real inexpensive using 2x4 treated posts and just doing 1 row in portrait. Uplift would be almost non existent from both sides. Also, I have this mountain of left over 250 watt micro inverters and connecting cables from the conversion to string inverters:

IMG_E1849.JPG

The DC specs for those inverters are as follows:

sunmax specs.jpg

Given the max voltage input of 45V, I'm likely limited to 60 cell panels, although I think some 72 cell panels would probably be save.

Doing a quick each, it looks like I can pick up a pallet of 32 used SolarWorld 245W Mono panels for around $100 each. So for $3,200 plus a bit of lumber, I could add 7,800 watts of capacity, with 16 panels facing East and 16 facing West, giving me a nice boost in production in the AM and PM hours and not push my 50 VKA transformer.
 
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