One of the big benefits of mounting your components on plywood is that you can experiment and try different orientations before committing to mounting them.
Appearance does matter! Have enough pride in your work to make it look neat and well crafted.
If you ever want to remove your system, it will come out in one piece without the need to disconnect every single individual component. I suggest mounting your components on a sheet of plywood, then mount the plywood to the wall. Likewise, if you change anything later, you’ll have a wall with unused holes. Not only does this force you to drill a lot of holes in the wall, it looks bad and is simply not a good foundation for your system. It’s a bad idea to mount your system directly to a wall. For the purpose of our discussion, we’ll go with a wall mount format. It does not really matter as long as the equipment is securely mounted to something. Others keep their gear in a trunk or cabinet. Most off gridders go with a wall mounted configuration. The second planning stage is to determine how the various components will relate to each other. Once you’ve figured out the logistics of where all your off grid power gear will be, it’s time to start wiring it up, right? Well, actually, no. Use an on line copper wire loss calculator to determine how large your wire should be for your application. Lastly, where will your solar equipment be in relation to the devices it will be powering? If you are running a strictly-DC system (no inverter), then you’ll want to keep the cable runs short since copper wire is very inefficient at passing DC current over long distances. If needed, I can remove the entire system as one module without having to disconnect every individual component. I have all my batteries, controller, and inverter in a closet under a stairway.Ĭomponents mounted on plywood, which is then mounted to the wall. One caveat to follow: Your system will take up more space than you think! Allow for airflow/cooling and future changes. Secondly, where will you house your, controller, batteries, and other supporting hardware? Ideally it would be an indoor, climate-controlled environment that has easy access for maintenance but will not present a safety hazard to kids, pets, and others.
A spot that has great sun in one season may be totally useless in another. Rooftops are a popular location, but do you have the means to haul the panels up there and secure them? Do you plan on replacing your roof in the next few years? If so, then it may not be worthwhile to do all that work just to undo it soon. It also has to be large enough to fit all the panels you plan to deploy.Īlso consider how hard it will be to install or remove panels. Where is the most favorable place for your solar panels? Simply having a lot of sun does not make it the “best” spot. The first step is to survey your solar power site. This article assumes you are building your own solar plant from the ground up (not a “box system” or similar off the shelf product). If having an off grid home solar power system has been a longtime wish, this article is for you! We’ll go over the planning process and important considerations for implementing your system. Many of them would like a larger, permanent home system but don’t know where to start or what such a project involves. Most off grid hams are off grid only for portable operations.