Thinking of self installing a 5kW solution onto a South facing garage. DIY solution appears to be 60% cheaper than hiring a local installer (Ohio)
I’m an electrician, I found my own solar panels incredibly easy to install. The job is 90% racking and I would recommend buying a racking package if possible which includes all mounts, rail and fasteners.
Take care as solar panels are ALWAYS LIVE. This is why they use the shielded connectors that they do. Do all the rest of your wiring first, then plug the panels in last.
Make sure you have appropriate disconnecting means. If this is going to be grid tied in any way, make sure you’re familiar with the code as it will be inspected. If not grid tied you may be exempt, but this is no reason to just slap it up, still follow the code as it’s there for your safety.
I recommend grid-interactive systems over grid-tied if you actually want to be power independent. Microinverters seem great until the power goes out and your panels are good for nothing. I would recommend a power blending transverter type system that allows 3-way power flow between panels, battery and grid. They have come way down in price and allow seamless integration of your loads compared to a charger/inverter system like I have.
Run a string voltage as close as possible to your battery voltage to avoid conversion losses. It’s tempting to go for high string voltages but roof mount distances are usually really short and conversion will likely be most of your loss. I started with 140VDC strings and my charger ran hot, dropping to 70VDC made it run cool and boosted my output by over 10%.
Depending on your utility it may not be worth selling power and the hassle or extra fees and regulations that come with it. That’s the case here - I just have automation set up to burn excess power for heat in winter and cooling in summer.
Best of luck with your install, for sure it is way cheaper to DIY and not hard at all.
What kind of charger are you using that needs to voltage match the batteries? I’m running 500V strings on a Luxpower 18K and it’s not an issue with the chargers in that.
Schneider MPPT 150. We sell a lot of Schneider at work and I got a good price on it. However it’s totally a piece of crap. It’s the only “150v” device I’ve ever seen where 150v is the do not exceed voltage rather than the operating voltage, and it will trip offline at 140v which causes a huge issue here in Canada where OCV can rise greatly below -20C.
Wouldn’t recommend Schneider in general as they require their own proprietary CANBus mod to get telemetry out of any of their equipment.
Thanks for this extensive reply. Not the OP, but I’ve been slowly doing my research on this, and this gave me a good base of things to look into. Cheers!
An example of of “grid-interactive” system is the ecoflow smart home panel. It’s the front runner I’m looking at right now for my own system. It will dynamically balance where power is coming from based on your batteries/solar/grid state. Easy to expand battery packs, and ties directly into up to 10 circuits.
Has anyone installed solar panels? What has been your experience?
Sounds like you are talking about grid-tied systems, but folks who live in vehicles often DIY and make most of their power from solar.
In my case, I have 750w mounted on the campervan. Depending on how I am camping solar makes 90-95% of the power with the alternator contributing the rest during reprovision/relocation runs. Over the past ~5 years I’ve averaged 1.76kWh/day. In the last six months I’ve been doing more electric cooking and so production numbers have been 2.16kWh/day
