I went solar cold turkey after my power got shut off. I have a harbor freight 45w kit. 5 lead acid semi truck batteries. 1500 powerdrive inverter. A 700w 900 peak gas generator and a 6/2 amp AC battery charger.
Thinking my next move should be to upgrade my solar charging..i saw a 230w poly panel for 76 bucks on ebay but the catch is its 24 volts and im on a 12v system.
If i chose to get the 24v panel should i
A:get a sixth battery and wire them all in 24v pattern with a 24-12 dc-dc stepdown to my inverter
B:wire 4 batteries on 24v pattern and stepdown to the other two batteries on 12v pattern(so i could use my 12v battery charger in a pinch)
C: something totally different from a and b
im a solar noob so take it easy on me lol all im really looking to do is power a mini fridge 24/7 off the grid. I can power everything else but thats my obstacle. Its a 1 amp 115v, 75w rated pulls 90-100w on startup and trickles down to 20 w as it cools. My fridge starts and runs great for 3 hours but by that time my inverter has drained to 11volts, alarms and shuts down.
first problem i know is my cheapy harbor freight plastic film panels. The other problem is cash. I can get a 100w 12v poly panel for $95 bucks or a 230w 24v panel for $76 bucks. I entered my info into this solar calculator online and it says i need 800w of solar to do what im trying to do. If i got worked up to 800 with 230w panels it would be cheaper but ill have to mod to 24v.
any advice on this would be great, or if you are doing this what does your setup consist of? My batteries are 50 bucks each panels were 120 for the kit.inverter was 40 bucks.
on a side note what are your guys views on golfcart batteries or agm?
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