Hello everyone, we at Mango Creek are updating our solar array. With the new prices in solar and us being on very expensive diesel power at some times of the day, we need more solar. We have just purchased 10 more 190 watt panels. We will be installing them when they arrive and when Terry gets back ( that’s me) from the USA. We were able to buy these excellent panels at $1.34 per watt, this is unheard of, we have in the past paid anywhere up to $5.50 per watt, so you see why we are excited.
We will be doing a step by step blog with pictures for the many who want this info, so do watch for this blog coming soon. With the experience of over twelve years of using solar we are a little bit away from the how to books. Our present array is 50 panels but many of them are the old style 47 watt panels, still working great but very outdated. We will be adding these new panels in the main part of the array and moving some of these early 47 watt panels to a little bit of an experimental installation. Our plan is to have ten old style panels set to catch the early morning sun. plan is to tilt them so they are still working till about 2:00 pm, but the early morning shot will help get the microwave and toaster working in the 07:00 am time slot. In this way we hope to mold the set up to a problem that we are seeing, our batteries are being depleted in the earl breakfast time and we hope to stop this from happening. The math goes this way 10 panels @ 190 watts = 1900 watts new power or at 24 volts we should see about 80 amps of charging power ( less inefficiency of course). Moving ten panels to early morning duty will mean 10 panels @ 47 watts = 470 watts at 24 volts we should see about twenty amps arriving early, we hope. We will let you know how this all turns out in a future blog please watch for it.
