carl and i were up late last night looking at stuff for solar panels and
we'll get into that later but suffice to say this roof is covered with them
and it makes a lot of power and that's going to be fantastic because it gives us about 200 amps
that we can run down into the batteries or run equipment off of run back through the inverter so
electricity is a wonderful thing so we've been working on getting solar into that beast down
there which can take upwards to 300 amps at 28 volts the v-mac can do it but we're not
too crazy about running the v-mac to do that we want solar doing that and carl is here working
on solar down from the north and he brought some lovely cool weather with him thank you very much
for that doing that i was getting tired of that 100 degrees so what he's doing is he's mounting
this thing into here it's actually a connector for a massive amount of amperage can come through
that that will be able to hook into our v-mac which will sit right here or it'll go up and
tie into what's that box called combining box yeah so we've been learning about solar
well paige is here to work on cushions and bars mowing my yard
very toxic to aquatic life long lasting effects we better not sink huh
oh yeah
amazon just brought us this this is a what do you call this thing a combiner box
photovoltaic combiner box okay has a fancy name basically the solar panels come down to here we're
having three strings of them so we're tying see i think three panels together in series so we got
you know the the leftover coming off of that so about how would we think that was it's gonna be
about 30 amps no in one string it's just it's just 10.5 oh yeah because we're upping the voltage as
we combine strings so there's going to be more than 10 so these are 15 amp fuses in here so
there's one string two string three between four string 12 panels all together three in each string
this is kind of wimpy because we're going to use one on here this is carl's job for the day
and it's got to be wired into there so we got to figure that out this is a surge suppressor
and all we figure out it does is just a couple of big diodes and you put a
ground wire in here so if lightning strikes any of this stuff it comes in goes across
hits this and blows out to ground instead of possibly going on through too much juice into your
charge controllers which are coming in tomorrow i think so carl will wire that
in and i gotta say i've been doing things to make people happy okay i went out and got my
[ __ ] card or twit card or whatever it is i'm i'm an officially not a terrorist now
and the best reason i got for that is i could may be helpful when docking at a dock that has
fertilizer or something that you know everybody's getting nervous about and i gotta thank matt for
the gift that pit bull air guns he sent me this in case of emergency the u.s coast guard asked
did you use tin wire on this boat i said nah stitch but we have walnuts you got one extra here
all right all right this is the schematic diagram for our photovoltaic combiner box the strings come
in here and go out to the mppt charge controller and the company says they hope we enjoy the
benefits of clean and safe drinking water after the installation of the hqua disinfection system
they'll fix the any defective uv chambers that we have people have
been asking me about do i have a manual for the boat like if i had that manual
not any much of a help okay because everything just comes right or we just put some standoffs
like the pipe go behind it oh that's a better idea no no because the water can hang down from
the window right there because they're gonna come in a loop yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah here yeah
no they go right here right yeah yeah yeah let's just get some wood standoffs
this is a standing desk i had a standing desk they're wonderful it takes a lot of time to
get used to them but they're great yeah but we have work to do you're gonna stay in the air
conditioning aren't you okay fine it's not gonna happen i need to get one yes you are
yes you are you're pressuring me i'm tense now all right listen all of our uh
you're not getting a step drill all of our parts have come in for uh the charge
controllers we actually have our choice now so we got the midnight sitting over there
and we have the i don't know how to say this victron's sitting here and uh carl
has been studying all this stuff so i think he's made a decision i'll let him explain it
carl has been doing some cat engineering here i don't mind that yeah takes up the whole wall
but who cares yeah i mean i think that works pretty well it hides that ugly gray pipe with
a whole bunch of plastic boxes yeah it could be better well and we don't have a bunch of wiring
but we can hide that with something to keep people from hanging their shirt on it yeah no i think
it'd be fun yeah you wanted to put it up here then i think so i think it's nice to just have it all
right here yeah it's low voltage it's a little more reasonable to look at because there's the
power it's in order too yeah this is power coming in charge controller charge controller power going
out you can shut power there and there off it's kind of funky you have to shut the power off on
both sides of the charge controllers so that you don't get power back into them from the battery
and that's the only time you can really shut them down to reset them or to do some cabling on them
look at this clever thing just clamped a piece of flat bar on there
to stop now you can't adjust it but it happens through the right side happens yeah it's perfect
okay carl here has oh he's been sick for a couple of days but he's back in the land of
the living non-coveted related that was nice yeah and uh he has decided on the
viktron energy charge controllers instead of the midnight 150s so why this one and not the midnight
the 250 can go um higher input voltage and so it's 250 the input voltage yes okay and our midnights
were once 150. so and even midnight even suggested that that was too low for what we're doing on the
voltage because it means how many panels you can put into a string we could only really do
two right that was their recommendation solar panels were 50 volts each yeah they didn't want
us to be right at it right because on a cold morning the voltage is a little higher right
they could blow them up will blow up yeah okay so we went with the the victron because they had the
the higher and what else was the charging thing was involved in it the victrons have
an algorithm for charging lithium ion phosphate right which is the newest latest greatest ratio
batteries yes not supposed to blow up as easily you catch fire and all that stuff yeah and they're
like no maintenance and they're pretty great yeah they're fantastic because they're just gonna sit
down there in the bottom of the hole and do their thing yeah so when you see this float absorb bulk
that's really lead acid type stuff but there was a way that we could hack the uh the midnights they
don't even have that they don't know about lithium iron spots but there's a way of telling it yeah
using sitting at all the saying that it works that way the first thing we do is we have the panels up
on the roof and they all come down to here you got this labeled port and starboard all right so you
got what's this thing called again i call it the pre-combiner because there's a post combiner too
also one after the charge and you've got this set up port and starboard so
so we come from the combiner port and starboard to our two solar charge controllers and they each do
mppt which means what when one panel's in the shade it helps somehow right yeah if there's
shade on the panels you can't pull as much power from them if you try to you'll kind of crash the
panels and you won't get any power out of them so you gotta just pull gently so it changes how much
amperage it's drawing for the power from the panel so it keeps the voltage up something like that
yeah all right so it does this mppt magic and then it puts out the 24 volts in whatever amps it can
from that over to this gadget yeah which i'm calling the post combiner right and it's just more
these are actual breakers instead of fuses so they could trip but it allows us to turn
it off here and here and you know i didn't think about that's important because if this
breaker is on you could turn it off over here but power still flows back up from the battery
and to these units so you haven't actually killed these connections so you've got to shut it off
here so that's why we put these breakers in and their breakers yeah and so positive and negative
from each of the charge controllers goes in there then what happens then it's going to have both the
positives come out of these breakers and come down here to this lug okay positive and then the other
side goes on down to the battery and then this is going to go out to the battery all right and then
negative on this side over here and after the battery okay and that allows us to shut it
off there and here and isolate our charge controllers should we need to reset them
or and these are actually programmable through your phone
so that's kind of cool so you don't actually have to get up and you know see them out there on the
wall and look at a little panel or anything like that that was the other thing about midnight they
didn't have the app for the phone you had to look at the screen to do the programming on it this has
a little easier access they don't even bother putting it look it says display option so yeah
it's gonna be so close to the ceiling you'll never see it so these are the standard plugs for
solar right and the rest of these are lugs and we're using oh actually we're going to replace
this because it's a little bit smaller than one on and we're going to go to one op cable brand new
stuff and this is interesting too you can see this is only 10 gauge wires because the voltage coming
in here is what it's 50 150 oh it's 150 gas right because we've combined three panels so 150 volts
not a lot of amperage so you can run it through a small wire but then when it comes over combined
it's going to come over as a very short 10 gauge wire and it'll still be okay yeah because it's
still high voltage it comes into here and then it leaves this at higher amperage but only 28 volts
the charging voltage for our battery and so that's when it goes to the bigger wires and then
the bigger breakers and lugs going on down to the engine i think it's too hot when it comes
out of here and goes oh that's right we ran two watts from the pilot house down to the engine
room yep because they're combined so from one up to two odd right so we have less voltage job
yep well fantastic it's gonna be great we have uh the boat going into the water and uh we'll very
quickly have solar power for the battery and yeah we can bake cookies in our convection oven and
it'll be fantastic run your hair dryer yes my hair dryer yeah yeah you're gonna keep looking
good on the water yeah electric toaster it's been great having you here thank you for all
your help and especially for diving into this and reading all the stupid manuals because you know
how much i hate that yeah fantastic thank you yeah you're welcome well carl made it easy for
me he made a road map for how to lay all this out and even labeled things for me i like that
the lovely thing about all thread is you don't have to have
all these bolts in the right length you just have to have small thread
yes i found the proper edge of that hydraulic hose so that's taken care of one thing has worked out
well for me for finding stuff because all my stuff right now is in storage boxes stored off-site
as i made a photo album for each storage box like this is box 21 and there's all the things that are
in box 21 so it takes a little while to find it but man when you go out to the storage unit
it's like box 21. so i'm also back out here with crimpers a wonderful pair of cable cutters
come back later and spray this down with dielectric grease
just make that copper resist corrosion a little longer
well there it all is just as carl imagined it and laid it out
so i got it put in next thing is solar panels but it's sunny and hot tomorrow
so solar panels will wait plumbing parts came in maybe plumbing so that's it for me
what'd you make today send us in your photos of your projects see you later
so
do so
you