More Solar

After a couple of months its become obvious I need more production. This summer has been wetter than usual, and production is probably down on average however I have not been close to filling my battery. It’s obvious to me I need more solar. I had always planned on adding some second-hand panels to my shed – I can fit 12 West facing panels and had collected 6x 220w panels from Facebook market place and another 6x 175w panels from a friend.

I always wanted to DC couple the panels on the shed to the battery via Victron MPPT controllers. The challenge was finding a solar company willing to supply racking, cabling and labour off the books. I ended up finding a company and on Friday they came to install them.

The night before however I found a supplier on Facebook marketplace selling JA Solar 330w panels for $100 AUD each – So I picked them up Friday morning and used those instead of the 175w modules.

The modules are now installed as two independant systems.

System 1 (left): 6x 220w Panels – 2 strings of 3 in series

System 2 (Right): 6x 330w Panels – 2 strings of 3 in series

I will now order 2x Victron 150/35 BlueSolar MPPT controllers and some other hardware to hook these up.