Fire tonight.

Daily Reminder that the 16th Amendment is constitutionally Illegal

Whelp…. I’m awake because a looter came down the driveway.

The panels on the barn roof are active. Just buttoned them up. There's 40 panels on the roof for ascetics but only 39 are active (3x 13 panels). It's a total of 11kw of panels connected to a 6kw inverter. These panels were displaced from my house roof and no one on facebook wanted them, so I'm putting them to good use. So this is an additional 13700kwh a year. At the price of electric here, that's $154/month of electric.

It's very cloudy today, but the sun popped out for a hot minute and I was making just over 22kw from the barn and ground mount panels.

When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Many people use what they know is available instead of something that might be a smidge better. Example: my ground mount array uses unistrut. It's $3.40 a foot in 10' sticks. I can get iron ridge rails for $3.42 a foot in a 14' length. Why is iron ridge sold in such an odd length? because panels are 40inches wide and 4 of them side by side are nearly 14'. So instantly you don't need to splice unistrut. Also the iron ridge connectors are cheaper than strut nuts.

I'm not going to run thru all the math here, but just in rough terms, I saved 2c a foot on strut and spent literally a couple hundred more on clamps and grounding lugs.

https://base.ironridge.com/distributors . I found a distributor within 1 hour of my house and drove over with the trailer to get all the parts.

Gotta share. This is just wholesome

Wholesome

For all you canucks and eurofags that can't have guns..... lol.

@Thomas is correct... there is no replacement for simply putting as many panels as you can in a system. Here is a chart comparing two identical inverters. Both can make 6kw. One is connected to 11kw of panels on a very flat roof, the other is 7.5kw of panels on an array that is 40degress. Today, Nov 4 is the day that the sun will be 40degrees high at noon... so the ground mount array is IDEALLY aimed for today.... yet it hasn't make peak power yet. The flatter panels are already topping out their inverter.

Keep in mind it is customary to over panel inverters by 25%... so a 6kw inverter text book should be driven by 7.5kw of panels.... in the case of my flat array, I'm overpaneled by 80%. The specs on my inverter would allow overpaneling by 3x the rated capacity.

Car enthusiasts say "there's no replacement for displacement" and that also applies for solar. The panels are the cheapest part of the system, spend more money there.

This guy is a real time outdoorsman
Going into winter you can gain much from his knowledge and experience in the cold......

He has some solar products that may be worthwhile looking at