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Another Winter another solar upgrade. Short overcast days are good at exposing a lower limit. After having lost power a couple of days it was time for an upgrade. The house is growing and so it our consumption, especially on the Summer months when we get used to abundant electricity.

Bringing the panels on site, I always said my son would make a great draft horse.

I’m becoming good at building in the cold, my fingers are not thanking me though.

All I need to do now is prop it off the ground and anchor it for heavy winds.

 

I like this frame, it takes 6 2x4x8 and this is the only scrap lumber left.

I did some quick back of the envelope math and so far our setup costed about as much as what we would have paid for grid electricity these past 2 and a half years. Seems like it costs about as much to learn how to fish than it does to buy fish, at least at the beginning. We have now entered the gravy zone.

New inverter

The old inverter I bought second hand for $20 bit the dust. In part due to my lack of cable strain relief which created contact between ground and negative, oops :\ lessons learned. I bought this new guy which works so much better I think the old one was on the way out anyway. I especially love the fact it comes with a remote start/stop. Since we rarely use 110AC and the solar shed is 50′ from the house, it’s perfect to remove phantom loads. It’s not like we remember to ever turn it off, but we can 🙂

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