July 7, 2025
Day 1,375 of the Adventure
Another step closer to reality with the auxiliary solar plant. It would function just fine with only one battery, but I wanted it to have larger storage capacity. You can see three of the four necessary components in the picture. The red and black wires that lead upward in the upper right side of the pic, lead to a solar panel outside. Following the wires from the panel into the basement, they feed into a charge controller which converts the sporadic energy coming from the panel into stable 12V DC current. This feeds to the batteries by the red and black wires leading downward from the charge controller. The batteries store the energy as 12V DC power. Each battery is 12V and they are wired in parallel to maintain the 12V current. If they were wired into series, the 12V would be quadrupled up to 48V with the four batteries. The inverter we are using on this system is 12V so we needed to keep the battery configuration to 12V as well. (Our other large system powering our cabin and house when its finished, is 48V which provides a better efficiency of transfer from DC voltage to 110 AC voltage) Still, this system works fine in the 12V set-up. As energy demand is placed on the system, the inverter receives 12V DC voltage from the batteries and converts it to 110 V AC voltage for home use. The inverter is the green looking box at the top of the board. There are outlets on the right side of the inverter where you can plug in any kind of 110 cord. This is a 3000-watt inverter which you can think of as the number of watts available at any given time. For example, technically, you could run 30-100 watt light bulbs at a time. While this is technically true. It never seems to quite work out that way. An example of that could be if you were running a bunch of lights and then your refrigerator kicked on, the initial draw of power from the motor coming on may push the capacity of the inverter past it's limit briefly which could potentially trip the internal circuit breaker in the inverter and shut everything down. It's science and art combined. Math dominates the technical aspect of operation. A sense of power usage is required to find the balance between "just right" and "too much" demand. This is the system we will be using during our solar training seminar this fall. It's a small system, but inexpensive enough to assemble and use as a learning tool before making the jump to a larger "home scale" or "off-grid" application.
Adventure Quote: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” ― Albert Einstein
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