Updated: 2016-01-04
There is still too much snow and cold. We have had continuous snow on the ground since the beginning of December.
We have 6-days of snow starting today it seems as well.
Updated: 2016-01-24
We have had continuous snow for over 2-months and the mud has been horrific. The weather has been so cold I have not wanted to work on anything outdoors.
Last night I made the brackets for the junction box for the new array and I painted them today.
After the paint had dried I was able to begin work on completing this array for production use.
I began by cutting a hole into the junction box so I could attach the new cable gland for the main power line back to my office where the C40 is installed.
I trimmed the MC-4 cables and cut back about .5" of insulation and attached all the wiring.
I trimmed back the insulation from the heavy power cable and fed it into the junction box. I attached the primary and ground wire. I tightened the cable gland and closed up the junction box. Note the fuses are still not installed.
Since the paint was dry I attached my hand-made brackets and mounted the junction box onto the array.
I ran out of daylight and my hands were numb from the cold despite wearing gloves so I called it a day. I need to tie wrap the panel MC-4 cables to the frame and attach some sort of strain relief to the main output cable running back 100' to my office.
Updated: 2016-01-25
I didn't have any time to work on the second power system during the day until after work.
I ran the cable from the array outside through a cable pipe I had already created for some antenna cables to be fed inside (shortwave and wifi.) You can see the power cable in the upper right of the below image. I mounted the charge controller on the side of the aluminum rack temporarily using tie-wraps. I am fabricating a mounting bracket
By the time I finished building the battery cables, connecting them to the charge controller and then to the battery pack then wiring up the main power cable from the array outside the sun had dropped below the mountains to the west.
Updated: 2016-01-27
The three Sunpower panels (225W) are only producing about 18A by noon. It is barely able to sustain the use of a desktop computer (an i5), (2) 20" LCD monitors, gig-e ethernet switch, wifi access point, DSL modem and my cordless phone. I am using the modified-sine-wave inverter which is not my first choice but will have to do until I can replace it with a true-sine-wave inverter.