Post by JoshMan on Oct 15, 2009 14:46:32 GMT -5
Three 90watt panels on the top row, and three 130watt panels on the bottom row. These are all grid tied.
The rack is built out of recycled steel piping, and a recycled satellite dish mechanism to allow for chaning pitch with seasons. The small solar panels you see in the back are there temporary, and they total upto 30watts to keep the battery bank charged for power outages.
Back of the grid tied solar panels. A top solar panel is connected in series with a bottom solar panel, one 90watt and one 130watt. Since each panel produces about 20VDC I needed to get up to 40VDC for each grid tie inverter. Too low of voltage will not work with the grid tie inverters.
Three total grid tie inverters. The inverters ran us $225 each. They operate at 25-58VDC and can handle 250 watts of input. To allow them to run efficienctly I mounted them so that the fan is on the bottom and the heat escape is on the top. Since heat rises, the fans would not have to work so much to cool them as they would have to if they were resting on a shelf of some sort. The inverters do not require being wiried into the house, because they plug into a standard outlet. The reason we went this route is due to the fact that larger grid tie inverters require a minimum input voltage of 300VDC usually, and we can't produce that amount at this time with the setup we have.
When we turned everything off in our house as a test to see if they really worked, we checked the meter and it was spinning backwards at a nice rate.
This is a 5000 watt inverter that can power pretty much anything we need to in the house when there is a power outage. It converts 10-15VDC to 110-120VAC. I have it wired to the battery bank with heavy welding cable. Two cables on each the positive and negative terminals. The wire guage is either 0 or 00.
The battery bank consists of four industrial size batteries wired in parallel to keep the same voltage of 12VDC. They are wired with 8 guage battery cables.
This is the charge controller for the 30watts of solar I have connected to the battery bank to prevent the batteries from being overcharged. It can handle up to 30 amps of charging current and has a blocking diode inside to prevent discharging at night. The solar panels have blocking diodes in them anyways, so even without the charge controller they will not discharge the batteries at night.
This is an AIR-X 400 watt wind turbine that is capable of producing 33 amps of output at 12-24 VDC. It has a charge controller built in the circuit board of the turbine that prevents overcharging and slows the blades down during high winds or when the battery is charged and kicks itself out of the wind. The stock model comes with 3 blades that are 6in shorter than the 6 blades we put on. The reason for 6 blades is that we do not get high winds where I live, it's mainly nice breezes, so we needed them to capture enough wind to turn the wind turbine more than what it was. We kept doing tests and this was the best outcome.
The wind turbine is 40 feet in the air, and is secured with four guide wires, the pole is 2 feet in the ground, and is strapped to the garage.
The wind turbine is not grid tied, it's connected to the battery bank to give us additional power during power outages. Face it when the power is out it's usually because of a storm which means it's windy outside. Our grid tie inverters are meant to hook up with the type of wind turbine I have though, I made sure of that. They put about 0.4A of current to a wind turbine like the AIR-X design to keep it running. Without some power going to the turbine, it will not work.
Lastly, I keep everything that is connected to the battery bank going through a fuse box for safety.