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The Solar
| The solar installation consists of 40 75 watt panels. 16 on a fixed mount and 24 on a Wattsun dual axis tracker. |  |
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The first set of panels are going on a fixed rack.
Jenny drills the pilot hole for the panel braces to bolt to. |
| The panels are being mounted using the hardware I designed for our previous installation in the Bay Area |  |
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Here we go, 16 panels mounted up and ready to make power. At peak sun they put out about 800 watts. |
| Got to wire them up. The white wires (in front of my gut) goes into a conduit that runs underground to the power shed. |  |
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Boy, I cannot say enough good about the folks at Wattsun, they make a great product and are great to deal with. I highly recommend you consider them when you put in your solar array. The Wattsun tracker is solidly built, and unlike passive units, holds solid on target in the wind. |
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This is the beginning of the tracker installation. Here I am welding together a re-bar frame in preparation for pouring concrete. The hole is 4 foot square by 4.5 foot deep. Yes I dug it by hand. |
| The re-bar frame is done and the conduit back to the power shed is in. Only thing missing is the concrete. |  |
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Here comes the concrete truck. |
| I'm not sure how I got stuck with this job, I thought the driver did this. |  |
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Good thing this is going to be covered with dirt because I am no concrete finisher. |
| About two months after the concrete pour the tracker arrived. Here is the control head mounted on the pole. You should have seen me wrestle that thing up there it was very heavy. |  |
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Well you live and you learn. If I ever do this again I will put the torque tube on while its on the ground. Getting everything lined up so I could put that bolt in took hours. Later, when I had nothing better to do, I read the instructions, which state "always install torque tube while tracker is on the ground. Heck who reads instructions right? |
| Finally torque tube is in place. Now for the panel mounts. |  |
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Panel mounts are up, now to install the solar panels. |
| Jenny tightening up the mounting hardware. I preferred standing in the loader bucket of the tractor to using a ladder. This array will put out around 1200 watts throughout the day. So combined with the power from the fixed panels we get around 2KW when the sun is out and at it's peak. |  |
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It's working! Now as soon as the sun peeks over the horizon this array turns and faces it square on so we get maximum power from the panels. Then it follows the sun across the sky during the day. How do I keep it from blowing over? Well it is supposed to be good for up to 100MPH winds, but who wants to find out if it lives up to the spec? So I built a microprocessor control using the wind sensor from my old davis weather system and when the wind speed hits 55 the panels lay flat. Yes it has had to flatten them many times, so far the highest wind I have recorded is 70MPH, but I hear it has hit 125 a time or two. |
Where does the power go? These are the batteries, around 10 KW of storage, that is if you were to discharge them fully, which you never want to do. For maximum battery life you want to use no more than 50% of the capacity between recharges. Each deep discharge (more than 50%) shortens the life of the battery. Except for occasionally adding water, there is no maintenance to speak of. |
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What then? These are our inverters, they produce 220 volts AC to power the house. The black box is a charge controller. These babies have been running for 6 years non stop without a single problem. |
2007 Update | |
Oh my! We have a baby tracker! I guess our main tracker was fooling around on us. The 16 panels that were fixed mounted are now following the sun every day. I found I needed the extra boost that this produces to power our new spa, a real power hog. |
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