If you haven't heard about the Scalable Ground Mount System, it's one of the most cost-effective,
easy to set up, and flexible ground solar panel mounting system on the market today.
This is Mike with RPS Solar Pumps and I'm going to give you a quick overview
of the system and how to set it up. It's called the Scalable Ground Mount because of
the flexibility it provides in setting up your solar array. You can start with a smaller kit
and if you ever need to add on, you simply add more columns of panels in order to increase the
size of your array. You don't have to tear the whole thing down and start your installation over.
It comes in two boxes: one longer box with our rails and another smaller box with our hardware
and things like the T-caps. What you're going to need to provide are the tools for installation,
such as shovels and post hole diggers. You're going to need to provide concrete. You're also
going to need to provide 2-inch steel pipe. The user manual tells you, depending on your mount,
how much two-inch pipe you're going to need. Today we're going to be setting up our vc2 hr8 mount.
That's going to fit 16 100 watt solar panels. We also have a version of this mount that's going
to fit eight of the larger panels -- anywhere from 250 up to around 400 watts depending on
the exact size. Let's talk a little bit about where you want to place your solar array for
maximum sun exposure. So we want to find a nice clear open area with no trees around. If you do
have a lot of trees you might be a little limited and so you might have to take out your chainsaw
and cut them back a little bit in order to get the most amount of sun hours on your solar array.
Second consideration is we want the solar panels facing true south,
not magnetic south. If you pull out your smartphone you can pull up the compass app
and find where your true south is, and we're going to want the solar panels facing that direction.
Here we have our nice location and right there is true south. The final consideration is tilt angle
based upon the latitude of your location. You want to adjust the tilt angle and we have that table in
the user manual. So get out a map, look up your latitude, and use the corresponding tilt mount
when you set up your panels. For the vc2 hr8 we're going to have two columns of panels in eight rows
of panels per column. That's going to end up with four vertical posts. The whole system is set up on
an 80 inch grid, so that means we want an 80 inch square for our post. The vc2 hr8 has two columns
of panels each containing eight 100 watt solar panels for a total of 16 solar panels. It's going
to need four vertical posts: two in the front, two in the back, and those are based on a square
80 inches center to center from each of the posts. That makes it super simple to lay out,
and let's go ahead and start laying that out here as we get ready to install our pipes.
So we have our four post holes marked out in an 80 by 80 inch grid. Like I said, for the vc2 hr8
we're going to need four vertical posts. If you're doing a larger mount such as the vc3 or vc4,
you're going to need to add another row of vertical posts 80 inches away. But
it's all based on an 80 inch grid to make it ultra easy. So I think I have a square,
and I'm going to want to measure the diagonals in both directions in order to make sure they're
113 inches apart. I've already done that. This is good if you have one side that's shorter. It means
you're off-square and you need to bring in either one or the other edge in order to get square.
Now let's go ahead, I'm going to grab my posthole digger and we're going to dig the post holes.
Like it says in your user manual, you're going to want to place the post at least
30 to 48 inches below the ground with a couple of bags of concrete in each hole,
in order to provide a very sturdy structural foundation. Let's go ahead and get these dug.
So you can see we have our two-inch vertical pipes mounted on the ground.
There's two methods for this. One is based on your latitude. You can pre-cut the front pipe
and the rear pipe but then you're going to want to make sure you have a consistent depth
for your hole, and if you're on non-level ground, you need to take that in account in advance.
The way I prefer to do it is I prefer to mount a 10 or 12 foot pipe for the rear posts and then
cut it in half, and that'll give you either five or six foot pipe for your front posts.
From there we can use a straight edge in order to cut the pipes for our specific tilt angle as
dictated by our user manual and your latitude. Let's go over that process real quick. If you're
going to use the cutting method in order to get that straight edge, let's go into our
box of parts and grab out a couple components. Let's go into these boxes, I'll explain some
of the components as I pull them out but we're going to use these to create our straight edge.
Inside the box we're going to find a bunch of different components. First, what we're going to
see is our rail joining equipment which allows us to create the long rails, and the adapter
plates to mount our rails to our top pipe. We have the detailed user manual walking you through all
of this installation and laying out everything I'm explaining in this video. There are T-caps.
The T-caps are going to go on top of our vertical pipes and they're going to adapt to our top pipe.
In this case we have four of them.
We have more rail joining assemblies.
We also have all of our mounting hardware. This bolts the panels onto our rails.
And finally various fittings and components that you're going to need to join this all together.
So each of our long panel rails is going to be created out of three of these shorter rails.
The reason I'm doing this now is I want one long rail that's nice and straight in order
to cut and lay out my vertical posts let's get these rails assembled and we'll move back over
finishing off our vertical post for joining each of the rails. We're going to use two rail
inserts that slide into the end of our rail in one rail joining plate with the appropriate hardware
that's going to provide a very reinforced connection in order to form the longer rails.
We have our first set of rails joined using two rail joining inserts and our rail joining plate.
We're gonna do this a third time to make one long rail out of three of the shorter rails,
and then we're gonna do that another three times in order to create four long rails.
We
already have one long rail done. Let's go ahead and get the post cut to the right lengths. So
the height of your front post can be based on preference. In general, we go about a foot and
a half to two feet from the ground, but if you have a lot of bushes or grass that goes higher,
you might want to go a little bit taller with your front vertical posts. Like I mentioned, if
you left all of your posts a little bit long then you don't have to worry about hole depth. And at
this point, we can measure our posts and cut them with a Sawzall in order to get an exactly level
and correctly oriented system. So we're going to go ahead, we're going to mark our front posts,
cut those to length, and to do that, a very easy way is we can take our panel rail
and, using your smartphone -- and most of them have a level app, and if you don't have a level
app, you can probably download one to your phone -- we can set that on our rail and especially if
you have another helper, you can get your front post level, mark them both, and cut them off.
Our front posts are nice and level. In this case, we chose about a foot and a half off the ground,
and now we're going to cut our back posts. And with that, we're going to want to set
the proper tilt angle that's laid out in your user manual based on your latitude. In our case,
we're going to target around 38 degrees, which is going to give us a very nice year-round average.
If you want more water or more power in the summer, you're going to go with a shallower
angler. If you want more power, more water in the winter, you're going to go with a steeper angle.
In this case, we're just going to use a nice year-round average. Again, we're going to use
our long rail in order to make sure we have the right angle using our smartphone app.
We can set our angle and cut off our posts in order to make sure it's all nice. And at the
right height, before we cut these final two back posts, we're gonna again use our rail and just
double-check that our marks are level. And they are, and so we're gonna go ahead and cut them to
we have all of our vertical two inch pipes cut to the proper height
now we're going to go ahead and put our tees on top.
Before we tighten the set screws on our tees, we're going to want to slide in our two inch pipe
that formed the top bars. Again, I like to use a full-length either 10 foot or 12 foot section,
get it all oriented with our panels mounted, and then cut off the ends for the proper length.
With our top pipes in place, we can tighten everything down starting with the top set screw,
then doing the bottom set screw and then tightening our U-bolts.
So we have our four long panel rails assembled, each made out of three of the shorter rails.
Now we're going to use our rail adapter plates. We're going to use two per
rail -- including the U-bolts -- in order to attach our panel rails to our top pipe.
The easiest way to install our rail adapter plate is to put our panel rail on our top pipes and then
slide the rail adapter plate carriage bolts up the panel rail to get to the right position.
We can do the same thing on the top and then we'll use
our U-bolts in order to attach to the top pipes.
So our first rail attached to our top pipes. We want to leave all the
bolts a little bit loose -- about finger tight -- so we can slide things around
as we mount our final three rails and get our first panel positioned.
Once we have our panels positioned, we'll know where the rails need to go. We can tighten them
down and then tighten down all our panels. Let me get the remaining three rails set up right now.
At this point we have our panel rails lightly attached to our posts, and now we can get our
solar panels. First we're going to want to find the center of the solar array using a
tape measure and then we can divide our solar panels into roughly thirds and use that to find
the position of our panel rails. Let's go ahead do that measurement and get our first panel set up.
So we have our panel rails bolted into position and now it's time to start mounting the solar
panels. Before we start we want to take a look at our wires on our solar panels, and we're doing two
columns. I like to place these wires both facing each other so it's easy to do parallel and series
connections. Then I like to start at the bottom and place the two bottom panels using our end
clamps and get them nice and square. That way when we build the rest of the array up, it all ends
up in a nice line parallel to the rails. Let's go ahead and start getting the panels mounted.
Setup overall is going to take around three to six hours. It's good if you can mount your
vertical posts in advance like the day before in order to give the concrete some time to
cure. Then the next day you can start fresh in the morning, get all your solar panels set up
and then you're ready to power either your equipment or your solar pump. The Scalable
Ground Mount is one of the most cost-effective, quick to set up, and flexible solar panel mounts.
If you need one of these give us a call at (888) 637-4493 or visit us at rpssolarpumps.com.
We're happy to help size a mount and get the right mounting system for you.