Bringing the Solar Array-C online and testing it out

Another project that has been months in the making is now being wrapped up, the third major solar array is being brought online on the farm and we can now power things inside the building. Along with power going out to the pump house for when the well is drilled. This setup will provide heat in the winter for the pump house to keep it from freezing. And will provide power to the well pump once that is in place. So we can water the garlic field whenever the rains are not enough.

This setup can provide 10,000W of solar power plus 4000W of stored power in the batteries on a sunny day. All of this is controlled by a Sol-ark 15K inverter. Meaning off grid I can provide up to 15,000W of power potentially to equipment out in the storage building. I plan on adding lights in the building along with more outlets. So if we need to plug in things around the building we will have outlets right there ready to go.

About a week or two ago I finished bringing the array online, but no loads were going to it yet.

But with the help of some local electricians they got me wired up for AC power. They did not want to deal with the DC side so I did all that myself.

Lots of extra wire from this project, will be using it soon on my next solar array project. I am going to be rebuilding Array-A and Array-B soon.

Using an electrical panel we can run its mains to the inverter and then power things off the circuits.

The electricians needed some wood supports to build into the wall for the service panels. So I got to cutting it for them and bringing it over. Got to use my new chop saw.. loving this thing.

It has a laser on it.. makes thing so much easier.

I finished burying where the electrical lines go into the building.

Then we got to mounting the panel, and all that extra 2x6 lumber came in handy.

With it all wired up it is time to test out the load on this thing. So far all I did was charge up the battery bank, but yet to test it.. Feels like when you built a car and about to turn it on for the first time.. lol

A special 240v outlet for charging my UTV, we can also use this outlet for welding and other high powered devices.

I decide to try to charge my electric UTV, at the moment it was mostly sunny but clouds were fast on the way. And based on my setup I doubt it will charge unless we get full sun.

Plugging in the special charging adapter for the Polaris UTV we turn on the breaker and give it a try.

Quickly the UTV demands 6KW to start charging at 240V. If I use the 120V it will charge at about half that rate. But figured we should try the more powerful 240V charging first as the sun was still out at the beginning of the test.

Hah feels funny plugging my UTV into charge. Loving the electric UTV though, just all new to me still.

It turned on and started charging, but looking at the weather radar a storm was on the way in. And I could already see it getting darker outside. Not sure how long it will charge like that. Normally I would produce around 10,000w during a sunny day at peak solar time.. around 12:30-2:30pm here. But otherwise it tends to be lower.. Such as today when those clouds came out.

Though even with cloud cover we were still pulling over 6KW from the panels at first.

But as soon as I started charging the solar output started dropping. As the clouds were blocking more and more light.

This is where the battery bank is a great addition. It kicks in and supports the load when the solar panels are losing light. It got all the way up to 5kw before the battery management system cut it off.

So the test was a partial success. I think I will try charging again when we have a sunny day without clouds. But good to see it started charging until the clouds set in.

If I really wanted to, I could plug in the 120V adapter and slowly charge the UTV. But since I have the ability to charge fast on sunny days figured I will just try that next.