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
Solar Sphere lots of solar energy items and solar education
Fire Mountain Solar Great prices & selection on Solar, Wind & Micro Hydro
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!
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!
Darell's site A good friend of mine's solar grid tie and electric vehicle site
. Some popular solar information site
Wind & Sun Northern Arizona Wind & Sun's forums
Solar Guppy Solar Guppy's forum, lots of great info
CalFinder Home Solar solar blogs, rebate information, contractors and so much more!
Outback Outbacks forums


First let me explain how this system originally evolved. We lived on a dead end road about 20 miles from "town" with lots of trees and often lost power. I wanted a computer UPS like system to automatically run our fridge, freezer and other small loads 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 current (fourth) system

Our current system consists of five Kyocera KC 125w panels, 3 Kyocera KC 130w panels and 4 Evergreen ES 200w panels wired in three banks totaling 1.8 kw. I have #2 run from the solar panels to the charge controller, about 50 feet. The charge controller is an Outback MX-60 which converts and regulates the 66v solar system power to feed the 48v battery bank. The battery bank consist of eight Deka AGM 8A8D's wired in series/parallel for 490 amps at 48vdc, or approximately 24kw. The batteries in turn feed the Xantrex XW 6048. The inverter is connected to a large sub panel, almost everything in then house with the exception of the pool equipment and geothermal system.

Since we have on peak / off peak or time of use rates we pay about $.06 per kwh at night from 7 pm to 9am and during the day from 9am to 7 pm we pay about $.24 per kwh. During the day or expensive rate period the system automatically disconnects from the grid and use primarily solar power with some additional battery power to power all the loads in the home. Then once we return to the less expensive rates the system re-connects the home to the grid and tops off the batteries if necessary.

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 system. We heat our 16,000 gallon indoor pool (nice heat sink) with the geothermal using off peak electricity. 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. We use pool water circulated through the pex to supplement heating. We also have a 2 ton air source heat pump connected to the forced are furnace. For cooling in summer we use the geothermal heat pump (manually switching from the field to the furnace coil or both) 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 which typically warms the incoming water from 50F to about 60F. 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, in our first year we used about 12 cubic feet of natural gas for the hot water heater.

We also have an air to air heat recovery unit (HRV) 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 R3 to R4.5, not much but something. The pool room has an additional 1 inch of pink board after the exterior wall before the yellow board. Between the pool and the house on the wall are insulated with 4 inches of bat, and the ceiling has 18 inches of blown in insulation. All the windows are good double hung Andersons with storms.


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

A picture of the solar panels on the roof


comments & suggestions welcome : nevermab at uwgb.edu
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