diy solar

diy solar

Very new to solar but started purchasing items, not sure of the final specs of the whole system.

Got a box of splices super cheap on ebay.
 

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Getting over 150 amps, 100+ one one and 51 on the other for charging today, we had lots of clouds and did move panels to the larger bank to help get it fully charged.
Here's the totals for usage and production, pv production is way below usage but the cats make up the difference on the converted treadmill 9 hours a day. Sceond screen of the lower usage is inverter 2 online for 11 days for Oct.
 

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We had 3 days of clouds, yesterday sunny, back to clouds, after 150+ amps yesterday, only making 7amps today for the whole system.
 

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Day 4 out of 3 in the cloud apocalypse, Morpheous was right Gates venture Stratospheric controlled perturbation experiment has released CaCO3 to block my pv production. This is a great test and glad I doubled the heating banks, will keep going to low cutoff if that should happen. Even with the 150 amps they never got a full charge which is 4 days without a full charge. Today was mostly negative and the main banks are the lowest since starting over a month ago. Today we did hold off on cooking the longer recipes and laundry. Not sure if I should hit low cut what changes could be made, except more panels. PV on both inverters were record lows. Even without full charge the banks are doing great, no runners etc. Considering how much was pulled since yesterday after sundown plus today and add the pv input they are really holding up well.
 

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Found out today the aux had started to come on, in the settings by default the ecobee showed no aux unless the temp fell below 35f. In Auto it was ignoring that setting. The banks were down to 52.01 this morning and load was 9878 watts. I disabled simultaneous aux, and then set it to come on under 5f based on the supplied temp numbers by mrcool. I also moved all panels to bank one to get it charged back up, the weather shows we will have about 3 hours of sunlight, getting over 230amps. Bank 2 on single array is getting over 50 amps, so that is a combiner of over 280amps. Also having no luck on finding bificial panels that are 30mm thickness for the next array.
 

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Still did not hit a full charge, but was much closer than prior 4 days. Full cloud cover by 3:30. New records in pv production though, the batteries are doing great. I was worried the most with bank 1 and the large breaker + fuses causing balancing issues. All the banks are so far beating my expectations for staying close.
 

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Last night in roughly 10 hours the hvac / mini split used 36kwh did not think it would be that high, only into the low 30's. Electric bill is looking decent so far. Still think I should install a few more panels though for safety considering the nightly usage. I really wanted to have enough to run an asic miner but that is not going to happen yet.
 

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Finally hit a full charge on the dual 4p16s made over 91kwh on the Nov 5, winter time usage is higher than I thought it would be.
 

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4s16p? What size panels? How many SCCs?
I built 3 of them, they are one large bank of 64 cells 4 cell groups 16 series, 80 500w bifacials, 4 charge controllers, but the 4th is not fully up yet.

More pictures here:
 
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So far the system is doing great, the banks are doing very well. No runner issues and they are staying .1 / .3 max of each other duing charge and discharge. The 20f degree move down can be 20+kwh increase per day in usage. Still early but getting almost 200 amps of charge rate even with the loads on both inverters.
 

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Bill came into today, so far the meter has not gone up since Oct 19th.
 

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Comparison same time yesterday 200 amps, clouds today: barely 40.
 

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I recomend getting a single battery pack. Lots of people get multiple packs and put them together. I think that is a mistake. Doing a large DIY battery pack in my opinion is not as easy as many people think because almost everyone I have seen do it does it wrong.
So what are you defining as "right"?

By wrong do you mean 16s3p is wrong, but 3p16s is right? What are you defining as a "single battery pack"?
 
I recomend getting a single battery pack. Lots of people get multiple packs and put them together. I think that is a mistake. Doing a large DIY battery pack in my opinion is not as easy as many people think because almost everyone I have seen do it does it wrong.
I was really worried about doing the larger 4p16s banks and combining two of them. But I wanted to at least try and if it failed I would have went to a 2p16s. But the larger banks decreased the costs of m8's, wiring significantly and complexity.
 
Hit a new record yesterday: 80.8kwh, plus a new record this morning: 12:00 midnight to this morning over 25kwh. (Heating Side) If I did not have the daul 4p16s the amount used from dusk to morning would be getting close to cutoff unless I moved it down.
 

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almost everyone I have seen do it does it wrong.
Thanks for the validation but I don't agree that it is necessarily right. It should be a function of the use case. There are good reasons to have multiple packs in parallel as well. My decision was partly driven by the fact that I already had a very expensive BMS and did not want to buy two more to run redundant packs.
 
It's interesting to see slight differences in charge rates on sunny days, even slight haze will effect the totals. Still trying to get more panels santan had a truck come in last week but unable to get sales to return any calls.
 

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Fire alarms just went off and I ran downstairs, inverter 1 was online but I suspect the pv board had some kind of failure. Array was reading 138v, but due to the inverter failure it read a voltage of 56v. After shutting down checked the arrays and they were back to 138v.Took that side completely down and waiting on signature to return my call. There was no discernable smoke but a very strong electronic small. Inverter was still powering the house and charging the batteries. It has been running perfect for over a month now so no idea for the failure.

On side note these performed very well, as I could not see any smoke they could. I have three of them for the inverters, battery banks.

Just checked solar assistant and it captured the failure: Odd the current did not drop.
 

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