The wooden frame is made to be adjustable. Right now the stand can only be set to one angle, somewhere around 60 degrees, but you could drill holes along the bottom 2x4's to set the support beams at different angles.
Here is the panel in Mihai's yard. We quickly realized how hot this panel can get. It felt almost too hot to touch, but I was able to keep my hand there. I've had the idea to bond a solar water heater to the back of the panel to absorb some of the unused energy. Also, as a panel heats up, it becomes less efficient. We hosed it later and saw the open voltage go up by about 3 volts on the multimeter.
Here is the back of the panel. You can see the Enphase microinverter we hooked up to the panel. For us, the microinverter was a huge disappointment. It was our fault though. We made the mistake of not doing enough research. This is really easy to do. When you are really excited and anxious to get a project going, you may overlook really simple things that can impede your progress.
So the whole time we were trying to run this little fan from the solar panel. Using a watt meter we saw that the fan only uses about 20 watts; the panel can generate up to 210 watts. The microvinverter has a status LED that we were using for debugging. The manual said that blinking red is not generating power, and blinking orange is generating power. Also, when the microinverter starts up, it will blink green six times. We we're getting the green blinks, but it would go straight to blinking red.
Basically after I went through the FAQ on the Enphase website, I learned that the microinverter will only work if its also connected to the house's grid power. So, I hooked up the microinverter to the house's 220V mains and then everything worked! Only problem now, is that without a 220V watt meter, we had no way to know if the fan was taking power from the panel or from the house. Enphase sells a separate module that reports on the microinverter performance. This was the disappointment. It wasn't Enphase's fault but our own. So now we know that Enphase products only work for grid-tie systems. We are more interested in off-grid systems, which is not the purpose of the Enphase microinverter. Lesson Learned. We are doing the research now, that we should have done. Next Sunday we plan to buy the correct equipment.
Here is the Arduino board with a humidity sensor attached. This is the beginning of a data logging system we plan to create. We want to be able to monitor anything we install. Right now we're thinking of monitoring panel temperature and power. The Arduino is running a web server which you can visit. Arduino Web Server It's currently reporting the humidity in the garage.
The last thing on our agenda was the starting of the foundry. I recently purchased a bunch of books from Lindsay Books. One set of books was written by David Gingery, Build You Own Metal Working Shop From Scratch. There are seven books in the series. The first one is The Charcoal Foundry. Above is a picture of the molding table we're building. This is where our molding sand is stored and where molds are filled and emptied. Eventually the wiki will have a section for the foundry, so you DIYers can do it too. Or buy the books, they are really great! Our motivation is pretty high right now, so expect more great updates to come.
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