Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2009 2:06 pm
I had to work out of town today so I decided to stop at the shop where I bought my 12V inverter from and picked up the 24V version. I'd already decided to do it yesterday and had reconfigured the battery bank for 24V. I briefly agonised over whether it was better to arrange the batteries as two parallel pairs in series or do much more re-wiring and arrange them as two series strings in parallel. In the end I decided to be lazy again and just cut two links and joined them to the opposites to make two parallel pairs in series.
As the new inverter is basically physically exactly the same as the old one, it used all the same power couplings and so was a "drop-in" replacement. I'm in two minds as to whether to sell the old one or keep it "just in case"... You never know when a 12V 1kW pure sine inverter will come in handy.
This now means that I can use all of the 604Wp of solar panels installed and still have some headroom for more as the two controllers will handle up to 800Wp now.
I also put in an order for the optional battery temperature sensors for the charge controllers, as the built-in ones on the Morninstars were getting false readings from the heat sinks on the controller heating up the whole unit. I also ordered the meterbus adapter so I can plug a PC into the Morningstars to custom programme them and download the 30 days of data logging they keep in on-board memory.
As the days are getting longer now, I don't need to rely on the mains battery charger any more but I'll have to get or build a 24V charger before next winter as my 30A 12V power supply won't work.
I had to bring the Sharp panels indoors tonight as there was a big storm brewing this evening and they were still just perched on those garden chairs.
I've started making up the roof mount for these panels but the main problem was waiting for a sunny day to paint the wood with preservative that you can only do on a day warmer than 10C.
Annoyingly, some cowboy car park subcontractors at the hardware store (in a retail park) have sent me a parking ticket for 50 Pounds because I spent 3 hours in the shop trying to find suitable materials. They have a car licence plate recognition thing and if you are in the car park for more than 2 hours they assume that you were parking there to walk into town. I've complained to the hardware store head office to get them to cancel the ticket or refund me the charge as I was a customer of theirs the whole time and I did spend more than 115 Pounds in their f*&$ing shop
In other news... My long time CRT monitor finally blew up and I'm writing this on a used LCD screen I picked up for 30 Pounds at a car boot sale on Sunday... Oh, yes! The car boot sale season has started again . Now there's lots of cheap stuff being sold off from companies going bust - hence the van load of cheap computers and LCD screens at the weekend.
As the new inverter is basically physically exactly the same as the old one, it used all the same power couplings and so was a "drop-in" replacement. I'm in two minds as to whether to sell the old one or keep it "just in case"... You never know when a 12V 1kW pure sine inverter will come in handy.
This now means that I can use all of the 604Wp of solar panels installed and still have some headroom for more as the two controllers will handle up to 800Wp now.
I also put in an order for the optional battery temperature sensors for the charge controllers, as the built-in ones on the Morninstars were getting false readings from the heat sinks on the controller heating up the whole unit. I also ordered the meterbus adapter so I can plug a PC into the Morningstars to custom programme them and download the 30 days of data logging they keep in on-board memory.
As the days are getting longer now, I don't need to rely on the mains battery charger any more but I'll have to get or build a 24V charger before next winter as my 30A 12V power supply won't work.
I had to bring the Sharp panels indoors tonight as there was a big storm brewing this evening and they were still just perched on those garden chairs.
I've started making up the roof mount for these panels but the main problem was waiting for a sunny day to paint the wood with preservative that you can only do on a day warmer than 10C.
Annoyingly, some cowboy car park subcontractors at the hardware store (in a retail park) have sent me a parking ticket for 50 Pounds because I spent 3 hours in the shop trying to find suitable materials. They have a car licence plate recognition thing and if you are in the car park for more than 2 hours they assume that you were parking there to walk into town. I've complained to the hardware store head office to get them to cancel the ticket or refund me the charge as I was a customer of theirs the whole time and I did spend more than 115 Pounds in their f*&$ing shop
In other news... My long time CRT monitor finally blew up and I'm writing this on a used LCD screen I picked up for 30 Pounds at a car boot sale on Sunday... Oh, yes! The car boot sale season has started again . Now there's lots of cheap stuff being sold off from companies going bust - hence the van load of cheap computers and LCD screens at the weekend.