Putting things in parallel
As I noted earlier in this series, there are many items to consider when making a purchase of panels and batteries. Chief among these is weight and size. An 85 Ah Gel Cell will weigh in at around 70 pounds. A 125 W panel will weigh in at 26 pounds with dimensions of close to 5′ x 2′. These are not very portable.
We can break these things down into smaller units!
For example, I noted that I needed 30 W of solar panels and a 21 Ah battery to power my Elecraft K2 for a 24 hour period. This is actually a small battery and small panel, however, as the size of the solar array and battery bank grows, and trust me – once you get hooked on this stuff it will, you will really appreciate it more if it is made of smaller units.
My first solar panel array consisted of five 5 W panels, giving me 25 W total of solar power to feed a battery. The five panels were chosen because they were small and that made them a lot easier to transport. I ran all of the outputs in parallel. This means I connected all the positive leads together, and all of the negative leads together, then fed the battery this way.
You can do likewise with your batteries. Having two 12V at 85 Ah batteries in parallel is a lot easier to move around than one 12V at 170 Ah battery! Trust me on this. I have a 155 Ah battery in my basement and the thing weighs in at 125 pounds. That is not easy to move around.
Again, parallel means to hook positive (+) to positive (+) and negative (-) to negative (-). Hooking them in series (positive to negative to positive to negative) is not advisable, as that will increase the voltage. We want to increase the current instead.
Check those device requirements!
Now that we are generating power, and storing it, we need to hook up our chosen devices. The easiest way to do this is to just make sure everything uses 12V! Remember, we can go +-15% usually and be okay.
But what about things such as charging up cell phones? My iPhone charges off of USB, for instance. So, I have a 12V car adapter I purchased that is made for charging the iPhone and iPod. That works really well. All I did was wire in a cigarette lighter plug into my battery bank, and charge away.
You can also find some other things out there that are a lot more fun than the cigarette lighter adapter thingy (which, personally, I hate). I will leave it to you to find the way to do this, as the number of possibilities is limitless here.
So, that’s pretty much it!
I urge everyone to try playing around with solar electricity generation. It is simple, cost effective, and it will continue to make electricity for you for many many years to come.