solar panels – grouchyfarmer

Catching Up. Bored… So bored… Records. And Solar Update

Wow, has it been that long since I posted anything? Sheesh… Well the fact of the matter is that there really hasn’t been much to talk about until now. Here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters we’ve been… bored… so bored…

That started to change though beginning with this nonsense just below.

Yeah, snow. I know, I know, this is Wisconsin and snow is something we just live with. Or, rather we did. Snow has been a scarce commodity around here until just this past week. Winter resorts are literally going bankrupt because we pretty much haven’t had a real winter until this past week.

But then in the middle of February, now first we get hit. We got close to a foot and a half of snow in just about a week, and then the cold hit, with wind chill temperatures down around -35F and still air temperatures of around -10.

The local St. Vincent dePaul society where MrsGF and I both volunteer has been keeping me busy, though. Our primary fund raising method is a thrift store that the organization operates. We get donations of gently used clothing, furniture, appliances, cookware, etc. which we, in turn, sort, clean, and turn around and sell to the general public in the store. So they put me to work sorting, grading, cleaning and pricing a variety of stuff, including books, video games and vinyl records.

We don’t get a huge amount of vinyl records in. I suspect that most of them come from someone cleaning out Grandmother’s house after she moved into an assisted living center or has passed away, and they don’t know what to do with the stuff. We don’t mind.

You’d think it would be dull work but it’s actually quite interesting, especially the records. I’m not a collector or music fanatic or anything like that, but I do appreciate good music and I have a small collection of vinyl records and an excellent turntable. So I do like my music. My tastes wander all over the place from stuff ragtime, jazz and dance music from the 1920s and 30s, up to more modern stuff. I’m a creature of my generation, though, so my preferences run towards pop/rock music from the 60s and 70s.

My job is to sort through all of this stuff, check the condition of each record to make sure it’s playable. A lot of them aren’t. I’d say about 20% of them or more are so badly scratched or otherwise damaged that they go straight into the bin.

If they do look playable, they get run through that yellow thing over there on the right. If you dabble in used vinyl records at all you need one of these, or at least something like it. That’s a record washer. It’s filled with filtered water to which a record cleaning solution has been added. The record slides down into the tank just keeping the label out of the solution. It’s then clamped between two microfiber pads soaked with the solution and rotated around a few times. Dry it with a microfiber cloth or let it stand on a rack to air dry. It removes not just the dust and all that, it removes finger prints, dirt embedded in the grooves, etc. I’ve taken records that were unplayable and after running them through that thing they’ve come out sounding almost as if they were brand new.

Then I play them. Well, not all of them. I mean some of those records are the stuff of nightmares, depending on your musical tastes. But enough to determine if the record is in good enough condition to sell.

Then there’s pricing. We’re a thrift store, not an antique shop. We have a limited amount of storage and retail space, so we need to move product through the store as fast as possible. Plus we aren’t out to try to make a killing on some “rare” collectable. The rule of thumb we follow is that we take the average price an item sells for on the used market, and we charge 1/3 of that price. So if a record’s average selling price is, oh, $10 on eBay or one of the other pricing sources we use, we mark it at $3.

Not that I really need to worry about anything like that. The most expensive vinyl record I ran into so far was a rare special edition jazz recording from the early 1960s put out by, of all things, a high end paper manufacturer. The B side was pleasant, generic, 1960s style smooth jazz. The A side was something entirely different. Each track started out with a recording of a different printing press in operation, and then the musicians would come in, matching the tempo and tone of the printing press’s mechanical noises, blending into a smooth melody and eventually the mechanical noises would fade into the background leaving only the music. It was unique and actually worked surprisingly well. The album jacket was designed for a 2 disc set, but the second pocket wasn’t for another disc, it was for paper samples from the paper company. Alas, those were not in with the recording itself. I had a devil of a time finding any information at all about it. For a moment there I thought we might have something that might justify going to the trouble of putting it up for auction, but eventually I tracked it down and found that the last recorded sale of it was for only about $35.

The other day the manager of the store presented me with a whole stack of video game manuals. No games, just the manuals. I didn’t think they were worth anything. I was wrong, she told me. There apparently is a thriving market for just the game manuals. Oddly enough, sometimes the manuals alone sell for more than the actual game disc sells for.

And books… So many books… Modern mass market paperbacks and even hard covers just get shoved on the shelf for a set price. But we get a lot of very old, antique books as well. You’d think that a 120 year old book would be worth something, but most likely it isn’t. So many authors and titles that I’d never heard of before, and for good reason. Either our ancestors were very easily pleased, or publishers were putting out just as much pure crap as they are today.

Occasionally I’ll run across a gem, like a first edition of a popular author like Agatha Christie or something like that. But even those aren’t worth that much no matter what you might see on Antiques Road Show.

Solar stuff… You’re going to be hearing more about this later once the weather gets better. A big ass truck showed up at my front door yesterday and dropped this off:

Solar panels. Lots and lots of solar panels. Damn, those suckers were heavy. That pallet there weighs around 700 lbs. Fortunately the driver very graciously helped me wrestle it up the driveway and into the garage. Even better, all of the were intact with no shipping damage!

This spring or early summer the entire solar system is going to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. Those are 430W bifacial panels that I got for a ridiculously cheap price, $109 each from Signature Solar. I don’t really care about the bifacial part, it was that price that got my attention. Even MrsGF told me I was nuts if I didn’t grab a bunch of them for that.

The south facing roof of the garage is going to get covered with those, the existing 2.2 KW of existing panels are going to continue living on the backside of the garage, and when all is said and done I should have about 6 or more KW of solar panels out there, which ought to really piss off the utility company because I should have enough power coming in now to be able to shut off the main breaker and run the house entirely on solar.

Since all of the existing PV wiring is going to have to be pulled out anyway, we’re going to scrap all of the existing wiring and re-do all of it. it’s going to be a pain in the neck but if we’re to meet building codes it has to be done. We’re going to need larger PV wiring, larger circuit breakers and fuses, run new conduit, etc. anyway so we might as well re-work everything, re-route the conduit into more convenient locations, etc.

Quick Solar Update: It Just Works. Solar Panel Issues. And a Frog.

Someone asked what it’s like actually living with this system. And since it’s been more than two months since it’s been running this is a good time to update what’s been going on.

As for what it’s like living with a system like this, it’s just like being on the grid. If you were in our house you wouldn’t be able to tell if we were running on grid power or on power provided by the EG4s and solar/battery power. Everything just works. We do avoid using 240V equipment like the clothes dryer and central air when we’re running off the EG4s because they are such huge energy hogs. But for everything else? We just use everything else as we normally would.

We’ve had no problems at all with any of the components of the system with the exception of the solar panels. More about that in a moment. The inverter/chargers and batteries have worked exactly up to their specifications. The only annoyance is that the fans on the EG4s can get pretty loud when we have a lot of solar power coming in from the panels. But since they’re down in the basement and not in our living space we don’t notice it.

The only real drawback to the system is that we don’t have enough solar power coming in to adequately keep the system fed, so to speak. We can’t, for example, run the house off batteries at night and then make enough solar during the day to both run the house and recharge the batteries by a significant percentage. If we’d draw down the batteries to, oh, about 70% or less, we wouldn’t be able to fully recharge them and run the house at the same time.

But that’s something we knew when we started this. We knew we weren’t going to have enough space to put in as many solar panels as we really needed without resorting to using the garage roof, and we can’t do that at this time because the roofs are scheduled to be replaced in the next year or two. So we decided to make do with as much solar as we could put in now and then put in the roof top solar after the work was done.

But the solar panel situation has changed this week so let’s take a look at that.

Those are the HQST 100W panels that originally fed the Bluetti and those, along with several 220W panels from Newpowa have been feeding the EG4s. And unfortunately I’ve been having some problems with them. Considering how cheap they are, about $75 each, they’ve been doing pretty good. In good weather conditions they’ll produce about 650W. Now I know that 650 out of 800 doesn’t sound very good but when you consider the conditions here in Wisconsin plus all of the smoke we’ve been getting from the Canadian forest fires, that’s actually pretty good.

Unfortunately that abruptly dropped to 450W or even less so something obviously is wrong. I checked all the wiring, connectors, etc and couldn’t find anything so one of the panels must have a problem. And now I have 10 of the Newpowa 220W panels up against the back of the garage for the time being. I’ll need to put in some kind of semi-permanent mounting system for them before winter comes but for the time being just leaning them up against the garage is working fine. I’m pleased with them so far. At midday under good conditions they put out a full 2 KW. Yesterday we had pretty dense cloud cover and just for the heck of it I hooked them into the system and even with the clouds they were putting out 345W.

First chance I get I’ll have to test all of the HQST panels individually to see what’s going on with them. The ones that test good are going to a business outside of Milwaukee that’s going to use them to run security lights.

And I promised you a frog so here he is:

Some Solar Quirks and Gardening Stuff At Last

Now that I’ve been actually using the solar power system for a few days I’ve run into a few interesting quirks. First the solar charging system. Other people with the EG4 6500EX inverter, or who are thinking of buying one, have been following along so I thought I’d warn you about this.

Up in that photo are 5 new 220W solar panels from Newpowa. I picked up 6 of those because I badly need more solar but I don’t have a lot of space to put them. These from Newpowa were the smallest size 200W panels I could find and that’s why I bought ’em. The charger in the EG4 is rated between 80V to 500V input from solar. That’s the minimum amount of voltage it takes to “trigger” so to speak the charger, and the maximum voltage it can handle from the solar panels.

Those five panels in series were putting out about 91 volts, which should have been enough to make the charger work properly. But apparently not. When I plugged them into the EG4 it looked like I was only getting about 450 – 500 watts out of panels that should have been putting out at least 75% – 90% of their rated capacity under the conditions I had that day. They were putting out half of what they should have.

I went back out, checked all of the connectors, all of the wires, made sure I had everything wired properly and couldn’t find any problems. The EG4 has two solar chargers so I plugged into the second one. Nope, same thing, I was only getting a little over 500W under full sun.

Grr, so now what… Could it be that 91V wasn’t enough? I had one more panel that I didn’t have room for. I shuffled things around and connected up all six panels and then checked. I was now getting a bit over 100V and…920W? Yeah, 920 watts. Adding that one panel, kicking the voltage up another 10V doubled the amount of power the panels were putting out.

So apparently that 80V lower limit on the solar charger in the EG4 isn’t quite accurate. I had to push 100V into it in order to get the charge controller to get it to work properly. So if you have one of these things and you aren’t getting the wattage out of your solar panels you think you should, check your voltage. If your panels are putting out less than 100V that could be it.

The other oddity is also related to solar charging. Before I configured the two inverters to work in parallel I was using one inverter alone for testing. It exhibits some interesting behavior. If I had the inverter physically turned off with the switch on the front panel and plugged solar power into it, it would turn itself on and start charging the batteries.

I personally find this a bit troubling. If I have a device that is physically turned off, I expect it to remain off. Period. Now I can understand why they might do this. If you’ve been using the system from battery only and drain the batteries down and shut the system off, it might then start to recharge the batteries automatically when it begins to get solar power. It turned on only the solar charger, not the inverter, so it wasn’t putting out AC so that was something at least.

Once I put the two units in parallel, that behavior changed. When I plugged solar into the turned off master inverter, it would still turn itself on with the power switch turned off. But it wouldn’t actually charge the batteries. It looked like it was in charging mode but it really wasn’t. It indicated it was getting only 47W of power out of solar panels that were putting out 500W. Eventually I figured out that both units need to be physically turned on with the power switch before it will now start actually charging the batteries. I find that disappointing as well. I’d prefer to be able to do what I did before, which was to use the unit to charge the batteries without having to switch the inverters on. Running an inverter while it’s just “idling” along without drawing power from it uses a small but still significant amount of power from the system. Each inverter takes somewhere between 70 – 90 watts of power, or 140W – 180W for the pair. And that’s 140+ watts that could be going into the batteries.

One last observation. These things aren’t exactly quiet. The fans on the EG4s run all the time the units are operating, and depending on the load on the units those fans quickly ramp up in speed. Tucked away in the basement this isn’t a problem but if you’re putting them near a living space some people could find the fans more than a little annoying.

One last thing about the solar system. I finally got the batteries mounted in the cabinet. And found that my existing battery cables going from the inverters to the batteries are too short because of course they are. So it’s time to get out the crimping tools and spend even more money on overpriced copper cable. Always something…

Gardening stuff

We moved the two raised beds from the north side of the backyard to the south side. In the previous location they were starting to get shaded out by a fast growing maple tree and a spruce tree. Growing conditions there were getting worse every year. Now that the ash tree is gone the area where we moved them now gets full sun all day long. Moving them was simple but took a lot of physical labor. Had to shovel out all of the dirt in them, drag them over to the new location and then shovel all the dirt back into them.

We’re doing some decorative work as well. An old, crumbling stone wall is being pulled out along the west side of the garage and being replaced with block, so we got a pallet full of blocks coming in the near future.

I’m not looking forward to that project. I am, at heart, a lazy person when it comes right down to it. I’ve developed an allergy to hard physical labor over the last few years. Still, it needs to get done.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, I found this while I was biking around the other day and I had to stop and take a picture of it.

We have some interesting people around here, including some who are pretty good folk artists. From the road I thought this was a real person for a brief moment when I saw the hi-viz vest.

And let’s finish up with a cat.

I love cats and cats love me, normally. But I don’t know what’s going on with this one. She stares at me, yells at me, glares at me and just barely tolerates my existence. I want to pet her and give her treats. She wants to shred my face. Sigh…

We had to take care of our youngest son’s cat for a few days while he was on vacation and she, being a cat, decided she owned the house.

Catching Up, And OMG It’s On The Way And I’m Not Ready

Finally some temporary mounts for the solar panels after a couple of months of sitting in the snow and mud alongside the garage.

Let’s catch up with what’s been going on.

The weather finally got nice enough to let me get some chores done outside. First thing I had to do was get the solar panels up off the mud. I threw together some temporary frames and supports out of pressure treated lumber. I’m not putting in anything even semi-permanent yet because it’s all going to get changed around and more panels purchased in the near future to feed the new solar system we’re going to be installing. More about that a bit later.

The new setup seems to have made a huge difference in power production. I didn’t get this set up until early afternoon and at that time we were seeing high clouds that were cutting power production, but even with the clouds I was getting 500 watts or more. When the sky did clear momentarily they were peeking at around 750W for a time. At 4:30 PM after the skies had cleared I was still getting about 450W. For most of the afternoon I was running the entire basement, my radio equipment, the grow lights for our seedlings and the heating pad for the little greenhouse we have set up in the basement, the chest freezer and the living room, all running off the Bluetti with more than enough power coming in to run all of that and keep the batteries topped off. Of course there isn’t a heck of a lot of power being used for any of that. I think that peaks at around 600W of load. Still, that’s 600 watts of power we aren’t paying the utility company for.

Today is supposed to be warm and sunny so I’ll see just how much power those panels produce now that they’re more properly oriented. I am really pleased with those HQST panels. They’ve been doing much, much better than i anticipated.

The weather was so nice yesterday that I finally got the bike out of storage, checked over and out on the road again. After about 5+ months of a woefully sedentary lifestyle I was pretty stiff and after about five miles my legs were complaining already. The Vado up there may be an e-bike but it doesn’t do all the work for me. I still have to pedal it and I run it in “eco” mode so it only does about 25% of the work for me. Although I admit I will kick the assistance level when I’m going up a steep hill. Hey, what can I say? I’m old. I’ll be hitting 70 this year.

It was nice to get out on the road again on the bike but there isn’t much to see this time of year. The countryside around here is still mostly, well, looking like this…

Not very appealing but give it a few weeks.

The weather has been, as usual, odd. We went from rainy, cloudy, cold weather with daytime highs of around 40, to 70+ degrees literally overnight. It’s supposed to hit 80 degrees this week before the temps plunge back down into the low 40s again by the weekend.

And now the OMG part…

We made the decision to go ahead and make a significant investment in equipment for a rather large solar power system. I’ll go into all of the details later but we’re sinking a significant amount of money and effort into this and I hope it isn’t going to turn into a fiasco. We’ll see.

I thought I was going to have some time to prep for this. The company I’m buying the stuff from said it would probably take 2 – 3 weeks to put the order together, get it on a truck and ship it here. So no big rush in preparing. I need to clear space out in the basement, a difficult job because our basement is packed with stuff, a lot of which belongs to eldest son, and a lot of it is electronics so it just can’t be shoved down into the storage unit. And because of the condition of our basement there are limited places where a large electrical system can be installed. It’s going to take a long time to clear out space for it. And then I need to get miscellaneous parts like fuses, electrical cable of different types. a new transfer switch or lockout system for the main breaker panel… The list goes on and on.

So I thought I had at least two weeks to get ready for this. I don’t. It’s coming Monday. Something like 500 pounds of stuff on two pallets is going to get dumped off in my driveway sometime on Monday, I’m told. Or at least that’s the projected delivery date according to the shipping company.

Oh, goody…

I’m going to be busy, it seems…

Bluetti AC200Max Update: This Time It’s All Good!

So, I have good news, and I have good news. Very good for a change.

First, regarding Bluetti customer service: Not only did I get a positive response from the company’s regular customer service department that was actually helpful, this morning I got an email from an actual engineer at the company to discuss specifics about the problems I encountered. As noted before the voltage fluctuation problem went away by itself but they’re concerned about that light flickering and wanted specific information about the brand, model and other details about that light so they could look into it. That’s not a big issue though because I believe the problem is related to that particular model light and that one only. All the others I tested had no problems. I suspect it is an issue with the design of that light fixture.

So that makes me feel a lot better when it comes to customer service.

My solar panels arrived! I ordered 4, 100W panels from a company called HQST mainly because they were very cheap. And it turns out that not only were they very cheap, they’re very good as well. It took me all of about 10 minutes to set them up leaning against the backside of the garage, one of them shaded by that stupid bush out there. And at the moment I’m getting almost 300 watts out of them (hooked in series) If I didn’t have that one panel being partly shaded and had them at the right angle relative to the sun I’d be getting close to the full 400 watts out of them. So I’m enormously pleased with that too.

Right now I’m getting between 250 – 300 watts out of ’em. We have some intermittent high, thin clouds that shade them out a bit which is why there is the fluctuation in output. I’m drawing 190W in the office at the moment running my laptop with 2 monitors, stereo speakers and a few other things, so the panels are making about 100W more than what I’m consuming here in the office.

I tried dual charging the AC200 as well, charging with the AC200Max’s AC charger and the solar panels and it was happily sucking down about 750 – 800 watts from both sources at the same time.

So I am enormously pleased. (Squeals like small child)