What Will Our Solar Upgrade Power?

[@johnwyman6126]

I believe that's an mppt controller from renogy, if so it should be able to handle 24 volts. With one more battery, and a 24 volt inverter, you can switch to a 24 volt system. Which will allow you to increase the size to double what you have now.

[@off-gridonfriday562]

Thank you for the advice! How many panels would you suggest after adding a battery? Also, if we go to a 24 volt inverter, should we look for it to be 2,000 watt model (vs the 1,000 watt we have now)? Thank you!

[@johnwyman6126]

It all depends upon what you're trying to do. If you only want to power the fridge, tv, and DVD player you probably have enough now. But ... if like most people you want to keep adding loads to the system, then you're going to want to produce more. At that point it's a matter of budget. Once you get near the limit of your charge controller, then I would suggest going to 24 volts in order to keep being able to use that charge controller. Once you do you'll need to learn about series parallel wiring , and get a different inverter that can handle the 24 volts. There are lots of poor quality inexpensive inverters out there, so you have to be careful. The North American, and some European inverters are high quality, but very expensive. I would suggest you start doing some research on inverters, the difference between high frequency and low frequency inverters, and real, honest customer reviews. There's one I think you should look at that may not come up in your search called Genetry solar. They're still getting their feet under themselves, but they are working very hard to produce a durable, reliable feature packed inverter that still has a reasonable cost. One very unique capability of their low frequency, toroidal Transformer inverter is that it can be upgraded from 24 volts to 48 volts. I don't know of any others that can do that. If you sit down and plan out what you expect your final system to look like, how big it is and everything, then make a plan on how to get there and what equipment you should purchase that will still work with the final system you will probably find that very little equipment cost was wasted along the journey. Good luck, and good job walking the walk. That's a lot more than most have done.

[@naturepreservelife]

Congrats on getting the system set up and working. I'm guessing this is a trial run and you will expand once you get deeper into your build?

[@off-gridonfriday562]

Hey NPL! Actually, we are maxed out with our current components. Our 40 amp MPPT charge controller and 1000 watt inverter can only accommodate the amount of panels we have. We could add batteries in the future, but that is tricky because from our research we have found out you want all of your batteries to have the same date of manufacture.

[@lawrencedavidson6195]

12.8 volts is discharging your batteries too low tho, that will damage them.

[@off-gridonfriday562]

Hello. Thank you for the comment. Would you say that in regards to just a lead acid, or to a LiFePO4 12 volt battery as well?

[@lawrencedavidson6195]

@@off-gridonfriday562 My bad! LiFeP04 is quite ok to discharge down as low as 12.8V

[@shtfgarage]

Hey guys I'm building a very similar system except with a 3000w inverter and wanting to power extremely similar items. I'm just trying to learn what breaker/fuse sizes used

[@off-gridonfriday562]

Hi Ryan, I’ll be the first to admit we had to look up what fuses and breakers to get for our specific system. I have no background in electricity outside of getting advise for professionals. I called Renogy and they walked me through which breakers I needed and where they should be installed. I also watched a lot of videos by Will Prowse. He’s great. For our system specifically we made a few videos outlining the exact components we used. Thanks for your great question and all the best in building your system!