papoanaya | I am walking on sunshine

I am walking on sunshine

Well, I got the new solar panels and the charge controller. The first things was to test the panels, which they seem to be working just by looking at the blue light on the left. These were being tested in the garage and receiving light from a window. This also means...

Panels

It is wiring Time!

Assembling the generator

Wiring is dead easy because of the use of the charge controller. Using the charge controller allows for the automatic operation of the generator. It frees you the chore of looking at the voltmeter every so often to take care of the battery. However, not having a charge controller is not an impediment to build it and wiring is also very easy. It is not as convenient to use. First, how it gets wired with the charge controller.

Generator Wiring with Charge Controller

As you see, it is dead easy. This is because the charge controller comes with the connectors to hook everything without the need of soldering cables. Hence, to connect:

The solar panel wires go to the panel port in the charge controller.
The battery wires go to the battery port in the charge controller.
The socket and voltmeter go to the load port in the charge controller.

But what if you are not that lucky? Well, all the connections are in parallel in respect to the battery, therefore, if you do not have a Charge Controller this is the way that it should be wired:

Generator Wiring Without Charge Controller

The steps would be like this:

Positive of the solar panel to the positive to the battery, negative of solar panel to the negative to battery. If we have more than one solar panel, this would be wired the same way.
Loads, in this case, the 12 volt socket, would be wire the same. Positive of the load to the positive of the battery, negative of the load to the negative of the battery.
The voltmeter is a special kind of load, but it still a load. Therefore, the wiring is the same: Positive with positive, negative with negative.

The charge controller wires the same thing, the only difference is that it has circuitry to shut the current as needed. How this is done is beyond the scope of exercise, but there are plenty places on the web that explain how.

How does it look?

The actual picture is not as pretty even though it is fairly clean:

Internal wiring

So what's all this?

The blue thing is the charge controller.
The big black box on the right is the battery
The electric wiring caps are to connect the port, the voltmeter to the charge controller. The load controller has a 12 volt car socket. I was lucky to have a spare connector to connect the load and the voltmeter.
The connection and cable to the solar panel is on its way on the right.
The red thing on the upper left is my snow blower, that's not part of this :).

The whole system

This is how it looks "from the outside". Even though it is complete, there are still some missing items:

I need to secure the charge controller to the box.
I need to secure the battery
I need a bungee cord to secure the generator box.

The following open source programs were used to write this:

GNU Emacs to write this
Plant UML to generate the images
Muse Mode to write and generate the markdown