AE System pics

[Lowdown3]

Meant to have some of these printed for the GA campout where we did the small solar demonstration. Here's a few of the pics-

Input- we run 3 racks of Kyocera 130 watt panels. One is a rack of six on a track rack seen at the top of the page in the collage of SurvivalandPreparedness.com photos. Another rack I won't take a picture of for OPSEC reasons (no good angle, it would give away too much) contains four KC130's . This rack is 14 KC130's and this was all we ran our house on for almost 10 years before we added the last 10.



Input from these is all 24 volts DC and goes in with the Outback MPPT's and the Trace C40 charge controllers to the bank of 24 Trojan L16 batteries




It's all DC power to this point. Then the Trace 4024 inverter (big white box on the wall in the pic) changes it to 110volts AC and that goes right to the junction box in the houses. You can also see the black Outback MPPT's and white Trace C40 controllers on the walls near the inverter. Yes the building is a mess :)

[Grand58742]

Do you have any commercial power going to your place? Or is it entirely off grid?

[motesjm]

Thanks for posting the pictures.

Are you using strictly 110V in the house, or do you have a transformer for the 220V appliances?

[Lowdown3]

Do you have any commercial power going to your place? Or is it entirely off grid?

Yes and yes :)

We had power already at the house when we built it. A few months after the house was finished we added our AE system. Power from the inverter comes into the panel via a 110 breaker at the bottom of the box. If we want to use commercial power the breaker for the inverter needs to be off, then the "main" is turned on.

Our system runs our whole house minus the air unit. The power line for the air unit is run right out to the meter/main power line. While most people run their AC about 6 months of the year here, we run it 3 months, sometimes less.

Are you using strictly 110V in the house, or do you have a transformer for the 220V appliances?

Yes and yes again :)

Water heater is LP gas. We built an addition a few years ago and space was made in a closet for another water heater that we will do at some point that will be a solar water heater. Always plan for expansion and future projects ya know ;) Main cooking stove is a Brown LP stove/oven, back up is the Vermont Bunbaker we recently installed, we can cook on the top of that, bake in the oven and heat the house at the same time. When you remove an electric water heater and electric range from the equation, you don't really have any 220 loads to speak of.

We have a 220 transformer for use with the well, you can probably see it above the inverter in the pics.

[Dennis W]

About 18 months ago we put in a small solar system. We started off with one 2424 inverter and a transformer, as one of the goals was to run the well pump. That setup would not start the well pump. We have since removed the transformer and added another 2424 inverter to get the 220v for the well pump. A sub panel was added next to the main panel, and the circuits that I wanted to run on the inverter were switched over to the sub panel. The only 220v item is the well pump. One inverter is feed to each side of the sub panel and only the well is connected to one side. Every thing else runs off of the first inverter. The battery box was built using the wood from the shipping pallets, and will be rebuilt soon. We also started out with golf cart batteries but quickly changed to L16's (370ah). We are able to run 2 bedrooms, refrigerator and one circuit in the garage. We plan on adding some more panels and batteries.