Hello, steemians, and welcome to my page, eh!
I finally decided to set up the solar panels that I've had for 7-8 years and hadn't taken out of the box. It was one of those cases of "buy them in case you need them", but they sat in the box because I didn't need them. I decided to set them up mostly just to charge my deep cycle battery. That seems like a reasonable use for them.
What I have is a 60 watt system, four 15 watt panels and a charge controller, along with various accessories that come with the kit. The first thing that I did was to hang 2 of the panels vertically from the cross beam that's attached to the center posts.
I hooked up the charge controller to these panels and hooked up the battery to charge. After a couple of days, I realized that these 2 panels don't get enough sunlight because of the angle that the sun hits them. They would be fine in the winter with the much lower sun angle, but in the summer, the sun is much higher. I decided to put the other 2 panels up in the rafters of the greenhouse to get a better angle on the sun. The first thing I had to do was to attach them to a couple of 2X4s so that I could attach that assembly to the rafters. There's enough space between the rafters to fit 2 panels, so that's how I did it.
Then came the fun part, mounting the assembly to the roof rafters. Thankfully, I had help with that.
The charge controller that comes with the panels is a small unit, but it works for the panels, and I think you can plug up to 6 of these panels into it if you want to.
I would like to eventually get a bigger charge controller so that I can plug more panels into it, but for now, the system works well enough for my use for charging the deep cycle battery. I'm not sure what I'm going to use the system for other than charging the battery at this point, perhaps I could power a couple of LED lights or something. I'll think of other uses for the system eventually.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
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