diy solar

diy solar

Total Newbie Starting from Scratch

So spent all of last night going over every post w/ my husband to try to teach him what you all have helped me with so far. Then I wasted the evening trying to figure out how I am able to come up with a combination of batteries (and whether they are parallel or daisy-chain) that would give me 6,327 wHrs/day and 585.8 amp hours on a 24v system. Whenever I try to increase the amps up to that 585 - then I can't get the volts high enough - and if the volts are high enough, the amps are not. I found batteries that are 12v - 100Ah, 12v - 200Ah, 12v - 206Ah, 12v - 207Ah, 24v - 50Ah, 48v - 100Ah

I think we came to the conclusion that we might need to do 6 - 445W solar panels to start w/.

Anyone have any suggestions on what I might want to look at first?
 
Good morning Amanda,
I am new to the battery/solar game myself. Very confusing and oddly fun trying to figure it all out.
I do know from experience that you might want to look at changing anything that makes heat from electricity and change that to propane (hot water heater/clothes dryer)
Living in Ohio I understand the need for A/C in the summer. Your Bus seems big enough to warrant a split unit air conditioner which is pretty efficient and could help heat also.
Best of luck and have fun along the journey.
 
Good morning Amanda,
I am new to the battery/solar game myself. Very confusing and oddly fun trying to figure it all out.
I do know from experience that you might want to look at changing anything that makes heat from electricity and change that to propane (hot water heater/clothes dryer)
Living in Ohio I understand the need for A/C in the summer. Your Bus seems big enough to warrant a split unit air conditioner which is pretty efficient and could help heat also.
Best of luck and have fun along the journey.
Our stove and hot water heater are definitely going to to be propane. I already have our dryer and am happy with it - but we will use clothes line for most drying when we can. We also do want to do a mini split eventually. We were talking and also agreed we probably wouldn't use our window AC unless we were hooked up to shore power. We only bought it to cool our bus down as we have been building it these past few months (we bought it in July). It was just incredibly hot inside - and we just now finally have it insulated. Thanks for the warm (but hopefully not too warm) wishes! - Amanda
 
So I had thought that doing 2 - MPP LV6448 and running them parallel for a 13Kw output would be a great option for us, but when I look at what we would need to have in order to mount the 2 + the breaker/fuse box thing with the proper spacing - I don't think we have that space. I watched a video of Will installing on of the MPPs and it looked so much easier than doing it all individually with my lack of experience..... but without the space for it - that's not an option - unless the way I watched on the YT video isn't the only way we could install it.

So I started looking at the Growatt 48V SPF 5000 ES 5KW with reducing our spreadsheet a lot - because that is the highest one I could find that is only 1 inverter/charger in one.

Does anyone have any suggestions on if I am going the wrong direction here? We are still doing some framing, but I don't know if we can make adjustments to account for 2 of the MPPs - which is honestly the most idea of options. '

Thanks in advance,
Amanda
 
The solar king is a nice set-up. (See my diagram for it below)

In order to know if the Solar King meets your needs, you will need to do a little work to further flesh out your energy needs. To do that you will need to do an energy assessment/audit. Your list of devices is a great start, but now you need to put some energy and power numbers to the devices.

There are various online tools for this but I like to use this resource:


Since the build is in the planning stages you will have to make some guesses on things, but be as accurate as you can. This will not only help you understand the size system you will need, but it will also help you understand where the energy hogs are and how you might be able to reduce needs.

The Solar King:

View attachment 70274


Note: The diagram above shows a fust before the charge controller. No fuse is really needed there. However, I would advise putting a disconnect right before each controller. The disconnect should disconnect both the positive and the negative. Some people use two-pole breakers as a disconnect switch.
Thanks for sharing this!
 
Back
Top