Brock's solar page

some solar links I have found useful

Midnite Solar a new company with a GREAT background and products
Outback Some new sine wave inverters
Wind & Sun Solar & Electric components, the best one
Sun Electronics Lots of good deals, no online ordering though
Fire Mountain Solar Great prices & selection on Solar, Wind & Micro Hydro
The Solar biz Great prices on Solar & Electric components
Mr. Solar Solar & Electric components
Alternative Energy Solar & Electric components
Backwoods Solar & Electric components
The Solar Biz very good selection, very good prices
Big Frog Mountain Solar & Electric components
PV Bulk Buy Solar & Electric components
Advance power Solar & Electric components, truely the cheapest!
Jade Mountain a lot of alternetive energy info. & products
Energy Outfitters more off grid products
Homestead Products oil lamps and other off grid products
MHS Solar more alternetive energy info. & products
Safe Home good home safety products
Home Power A great R.E. magazine!
Right Hand Engineering software for Xantrex (Trace) and Outback equipment
Tom Elliot A great personal Alternative Energy site
Darell's site A good friend of mine's solar grid tie and electric vehicle site
. Some popular solar forums I haunt
. Solar Guppy
. Northern Arizona Wind & Sun
. Outback


First let me explain how this system originally evolved. We lived on a dead end road with lots of trees and often lost power. I wanted a computer UPS like system to automatically run our fridge and computer in the event of an outage even if we weren’t home to deal with a generator. So I bought a Trace DR2412, 2400w 12v modified sine wave inverter and two car batteries for power. I soon learned that car batteries although cheap do not hold up well to discharge and recharge cycles. I then bought four 105 amp 12v marine batteries. They held up much better to discharging. I only used the grid to keep the batteries topped off without regularly bulk charging the bank. I then added two Solarex 53 w panels to keep them topped off, still not bulk charging them unless the power went out. That leads me to our second system


I then upgraded our solar array May of 05. I previously had two Solarex MSX 53's and two Siemens SP75's each set wired in series for a 24v. I sold the four older panels and bought four new Kyocera 120w totaling 480w still wired in parallel/series to 24v. I pulled #6-4 from the charge controller to the panels, about 80 feet. The 6-4 is paired up to basically give me 4-2 wire resistance wise. The solar panels are then connected to the Outback MX-60. The MX-60 converts the 24v solar system to feed the 12v battery bank. Typically the MX-60 sees about 32v coming in and what ever voltage the batteries are at on the output side. I have it set to bulk to 14.4v and float at 13.4v. The battery bank consist of eight Deka AGM 8A8D's wired in parallel for 1960 amps at 12v, or approximately 24kw. They in turn feed the two stacked Trace (Xantrex)


So now we are building a new home. The home is about 2100sq ft on the main floor with a walk out basement on the south side, north side has very few windows and the basement is completely underground on the north. We have a 4 ton geothermal field with a 3.5 ton unit. I am not really familiar with geothermal, yet. Our intention is to heat our indoor pool (20,000 gallons) (nice heat sink) with the geothermal. We also have pex under the basement slab and under the main floor in all the tiled areas as well, about 1/2 of the main floor. I intend to use pool water circulated through the pex to supplement heating. We also have a natural gas forced air furnace. For cooling in summer we will use the heat pump (with manually switching from the field to the furnace) to cool the forced air for the house and heat the pool. The geothermal also has a "de-super-heater?" connected to a 40 gallon pre water heater. Also any water entering the pre tank is run through a GFX hot water heat recovery unit. It lets drain water heat the incoming water before it hits the pre tank which is heated by the geothermal, then passes to a natural gas 50 gallon regular heater (hopefully won't run much).

I will also have our small solar PV (500w) right now, but added mounts to hold about 4 kw above the nice south facing garage roof.

We also have an air to air heat recovery unit on the pool exhaust. So we exhaust that air which heats up incoming fresh air to the home keeping the pool room at a negative pressure from the house.

All the basement cement exterior walls have 2 inch on the outside and 2 inch under the slab and between any connections to the exterior walls. The pool has an additional 2 inch of pink foam around the entire shell. The above ground walls are 2x6 with 2 inches of urethane foam and then batts to finish filling the space. The siding has an insulation core with a rating of about R2.2, not much but something. All the windows are good double hung Andersons with full storms.


Our equipment currently includes
4 KC 120’s
1 Outback MX-60
1 Xantrex, XW6048
8 East Penn / Deka 8A8D

comments & suggestions welcome : nevermab at uwgb.edu
back a page