Solar PV Progress

One panel connected to the Maplin charge controller (recycled from the old 60W Solar kit). Not the best controller in the world, but for testing purposes it does have an LED voltmeter which does save faffing with my DMM every time I want to test anything. It was a bright day, although the sun was well over to the west when I took the photo so the panel was just getting diffuse light, but that's fine for a thin film panel. Battery showing a healthy 12.7v under load.

Unlike previous tinkering, this time I have a proper DC distribution panel. All the outputs from the Zig SP-4 are fused (3A per circuit) and the main battery incomer (bottom right) 4mm cable is fed to the Zig via a 10A fuse. 120W for all the supplementary DC systems should be plenty. The inverter system will run directly from the battery bank via it's own dedicated high current fuse. The black 0.5mm twin mains cables feed out to two separate lighting circuits. One is the 12v strip-light shown in a previous post, the second circuit feeds a second strip-light out in the main office area as well as the LED pelmet lighting in the kitchen.

I still haven't bothered with a secondary battery...I can always add one later if necessary - it might be needed in winter. I have a spare way on the fuseholder and plenty of spare capacity on the negative commoning strip. On the other hand, I can also see the possibility of wiring in an external DC socket to this secondary battery circuit. In a dire emergency (100% cloud on a winter's day, no charge and a flat battery and the mains off-line) I can hook up an Anderson cable to any of the vehicles (including Squeaky Joe in a pinch!) and have emergency 12v power.

Temporary fixing of the office strip-light. I need to clean the walls and decide on a finish before I fit anything permanently.

The kitchen LED lighting is very funky. I'm debating running a 12v feed to the fridge. The Peltier heat-pump and fan consume 48-60W (4-5A) from a 12v DC supply, but consumption is about 70W on the mains power pack. I'm guessing that some power is lost in conversion. I'm going to keep both options open. What I'm not going to do is use an inverter (12v < 240v) to drive a mains adaptor (240v > 12v) to power the fridge...that really would be inefficient! If I go for a DC supply, I'm going to pulse control it (on-off-on-off) so it doesn't run continuously 24/7. To be honest, at night it barely needs to be on at all once it is down to temperature.

And the 'bargain' £4.99 cabinet doors I bought in Craft hoping they would fit the kitchen cabinets? They didn't, but some pallet-wood to make a carcass and a couple of offcuts of scrap OSB...my 'brew centre'! I have my tea, coffee, sugar and Cup-a-Soup stashed in here, with the mugs on hooks underneath. Hey, I'll recycle anything, I will.

Grrr....I still haven't got a picture of the return on my worktop. Perhaps tomorrow, once I've installed the cooker. 

Yes, you read that right. A cooker.