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[–]yetanotherone_sigh[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I should note that I built my solar panel system piecemeal. THIS IS THE WRONG WAY TO DO IT UNLESS YOU ARE INSANE.

You should start with a plan. What is your load? Then you work backwards from there. How big of an inverter will you need? How many batteries? How large of a charge controller? How much sun do you get in your part of the country? How many panels will you need? This is called a SOLAR SURVEY and it's very important. So naturally I didn't do any of this.

I started out in a completely different way: I wanted something portable that I could go camping with. A 100W solar panel, an ammo box of batteries, a charge controller, a USB charger for my phone, and a cigarette lighter plug to run small 12V devices or a small inverter for a laptop.

When I started this solar plan, I didn't have a piece of property at all. So this morphed into "let's power a cabin". And I didn't have a pile of money, so I bought the panels one at a time. The deep cycle UPS batteries were free from work and they are EXPENSIVE ($1700.00 new). So I worked around what I had.