I am a big proponent of solar energy, not so much for wind. With things being the way they are in the world, it behooves everyone to build or buy a back-up energy system. Gas generators is the easiest but you need gas and that will be in short supply when emergencies occur. You can't store gas for more than six months so unless you have the means, and the discipline to constantly rotate out your gas, you won't have power long. Solar is the next easiest solution.
I have a couple posts on this subject and my own experiments and set-ups so I won't go over all that again. This will be about my latest upgrades.
In the early spring, ECOFLOW had a significant sale and I had some credits and coupons for even greater savings. I upgraded from the 11.8 kilowatt hour Delta Pro system to a 24 kilowatt hour Delta Pro Ultra system. I only had four 320 watt panels on the Delta Pro because of its voltage input limitations. The Ultra can take 450 volts on its high voltage input and another 150 volts via its low voltage input. I added four more 320 watt solar panels to my input array. Each panel generates 40 volts in full sun and altogether I will get about 2,560 watts of power on good sunny days.
I bought more of the same panels and built the base in the same way, because that seemed to work well. This is two 6x6x8s cut to four foot lengths and four 2x6x12s. The metal frame is from a company called Signature Solar. It is very simple but a lot of parts so it takes a few hours to assemble.
I moved location on the panel array away from the side on my house. The mountain to my front, and the orientation of my house, meant that my one set of panels were in shade until after ten O'clock. In the new location they get sun as soon as the sun rises above the top of the mountain, which is around seven O'clock this time of the year. This location is 92 feet away from my house and the wires had to be run underground.
I dug the trench six inches wide and 12 to 14 inches deep. I'm not worried about the freeze line for this application. It took me about seven hours over two days and that was mostly because I'm an older guy and it was quite warm and I needed frequent breaks to hydrate and rest. I filled a wheelbarrow with larger rocks that I wasn't going to put back in the trench.
To protect the power cables (I used 10 gauge cables to decrease power loss due to the distance), I decided to run them through 1" PVC water pipe. That was far easier than I thought it would be.
I bought the water pipe the day before I installed it, uncoiled it, and laid it out in the sun to get the kinks out of it so that it would lay flat in the trench. That worked great, I was very surprised. The next thing I needed to do was run a strong string through the water pipe to pull the cables through. I used an old trick.
I tied a small piece of foam to a roll of 50 pound test string and stuck that into the water pipe at the panel end. Then I stuck the house side of the pipe into my strongest shop-vac and turned it on. It sucked that foam through 92 feet of pipe in seconds.
Next up was to tie the power cable to the string and pull it through the water pipe. It was a tight fit and a hard pull but in a couple minutes I was done and could now hook up this side of the cables to the eight solar panels.
Right now, I have to run my power cable into the basement through the casement window so I had to cut a hole in the metal to push the water pipe through. That will protect the cables better than running them over the top like I was doing before.
To finish up I back-filled the trench and drove my tractor over it a number of times to pack it down. The soil is bone dry so it didn't pack down very well but we are expecting rain tonight so I'll do it again tomorrow if we get a decent rain.
The final step was to connect the cables to my Delta Pro Ultra and switch on the power. As you can see, I was getting 2,535 watts of power so everything is working as it should.
Total time for this upgrade, which was done over five different days, was about 14 hours. Well worth it for the additional power I can now generate and store for emergencies. I run my basement dehumidifier solely off of this solar system, keeping it off my electric bill. The dehumidifier uses 536 watts of power 24 hours a day so this is a very big savings for me.
