hello hello thanks for tuning in all right today we want to look back at the solar panels from
harbor freight been getting a lot of interest and comments on whether you can combine the old solar
kit with the new solar panel and the short answer is yes you can so if you see up here i've got a
couple kits of the old 100 watt so that's 200 there and we got 100 watt kit right here or 100
watt panel right here and they are all connected in the sun is starting to set so we'll go down
and we'll talk about exactly how to connect them and see what we're getting around sunset
okay we got 300 watts of solar on the roof 200 watts of the old kit and 100 watt panel a new
kit from harbor freight and you see we're only pulling down about 124 watts the sun is setting
as you can see the numbers are a little skewed because the batteries were fully charged so
the charge controller clicks off uh at about 14 and a half volts so it won't capture the
power coming through anymore once the charge convul controller protects the batteries so as
you can see you know we're pulling around 8 amps right now into the battery and it does very well
and there are some limitations with the wiring and everything and we'll go through that now okay your
harbor freight kits are gonna come with a pigtail like this and this is a sae connector one terminal
is gonna be positive and one terminal is gonna be negative usually the shielded one which is
the one that's right here and enclosed inside the plastic there let me get a better view on that
the one that's enclosed in the plastic right there on the left that's usually positive you see it's
red so the option you have is just to get one of the splitter kits from harbor freight that look
like this and this one's all chopped up but you get one of these four-way splitter kits and you
would just plug right into the sae connections and run it to your charge controller now you have to
be careful because of the amperage you've seen and then we were pulling down about eight amps
i think it was peaking around 12 to 13 amps the harbor freight charge controllers i don't think
are designed to handle that because they just kept burning out on me so i went and just got
one of those amazon ones and i'll drop the link in the description on that so you can connect from
sae to sae which is the cheapest easiest and least efficient way because these connections
will heat up especially with anything over 8 amps coming through them the other way you can
and then also depends if you're doing 12 or 24 volts so this is just for 12 volt systems
24 volt you have to run parallel so right now we're running series so you would connect these in
and boom you go to your charge controller and you're done the way i did it was
i went ahead and had all the leads coming in the two terminal blocks
off of the solar panels and you see they come from underneath there
and all my leads come down and i clipped i clipped these little plugs off these little sae plugs
i left the one on a new solar panel so i can move it but i clipped them all off and put pigtails
and terminals and used this bus bar system so the bus bar brings down just a single positive
negative down into the charge controller inside the little house and then the charge controller
brings it out and charges these three batteries here and then back into the inverter so yeah you
can definitely hook up the old and the new kits just really depending on what your needs are and
what your requirements are if you're staying small not needing anything really over 10 15 amps like a
regular household plug would do 12 volt setup in series will do just fine if you need more
power output like say 240 or 220 for something big you're gonna have to go to parallel and run 24 48
volts and that's a whole another story whole another set of charge controllers so this is
just a simple easy way to hook up the old kit and the new kit together you can either pigtail them
with that little connector down there or you can cut them and twist all the positives
and all the negatives together and have just one set of wire coming down to clean things up
so i hope this helps and as always please hit that like button share subscribe it helps the videos it
helps me bring more content to the channel until next time thanks for watching please subscribe