BBBC 2017 #23

This post is part of ToadMama's Brave, Bold, Blogger Challenge (BBBC) 2017 which is an attempt to make February go by a little more quickly. There are 28 topics, one for each day. 

Share a photo taken from your front door today

It just started snowing again and we are forecast to receive about 16" over the next couple of days. The orange cord is running to the back of the house to the solar panel that I'm using to test the charge controller. This picture is taken from the front porch looking up the driveway towards the subdivision road. The pile of snow on the right-center is the grill. It's not getting much use these days.

The picture below was taken from the garage showing the modest accumulation of snow this afternoon. All of the tracks are from the Prius coming and going throughout the evening so you can see that we got a maybe a couple of inches of the fluffy stuff.

Was There Enough Sun?

At 9:00 on Tuesday morning after several days of essentially solid overcast, the battery bank was down to 81%. When I checked at noon, it was being charged at 6.9 amps according to the Trimetric monitor. By 5:00pm after the sun was behind the trees, the Trimetric monitor reported that the battery bank was still down by 33 amp-hours and the bank was at 92%. Not too shabby for only a single panel in Alaska. I turned off the inverter since the forecast is calling for a week of snow. Even though it has been heavy overcast or snowing most of Wednesday, the panel still produced enough charge to get the battery bank up to 94%. So, no, there wasn't enough sun in one day to completely charge the battery bank.

I did get the combiner box mostly assembled. This is a waterproof junction box that will be screwed onto the roof of the RV. Once I get it positioned, a hole will be drilled in the bottom of the box into the roof for the 4 awg wires that lead to the charge controller in the storage compartment from each of the short bus bars in this box. The 10 awg wires from each pair of 100 watt panels will be brought in through the waterproof connections that thread into the pvc fittings on the bottom of the picture. The box cover with it's seal is seen above the junction box. The short bus bars are made for both the two sizes of wire. The box is PVC so plastic cement was used to assemble the box and the two bus bars will be screwed in from the bottom. I think there might be room in the box for two inline 15 amp fuses. One for each pair of panels. And there will be another short bus bar for the ground wires. With all of that the box will be pretty packed. If I decide to install additional panels, there is a 4" tall junction box available at Lowes instead of this 2" box.