Shooting A solar panel with a gun

[jflorey2]

Did you get hazardous duty pay for the install ?

No, but I did get free jumps.

[J.P.M.]

No, but I did get free jumps.

No jump pay ?

[jflorey2]

No jump pay ?

To go completely off topic for a second -

There were two operations there - TacAir, which did military freefall training, and Skydive San Diego, the civilian operation. They used the same planes, the same landing area etc most of the time. I worked for TacAir as a jumpmaster and got paid for doing that. For the work on the solar power system I got free jumps on the civilian side. I never came close to breaking even; I would have had to make about 40 jumps a week to do that.

However, I learned a lot about off-grid solar during those years. The system was basically inherited, and started off as a largish (almost dead) battery bank made up of no-label 12V deep cycle batteries. It used a discrete charger and inverter fed by a bargain basement diesel generator. I wrote up a plan to replace it all with LPG generators plus about 2KW of solar. (Generators to run the place when it was open, solar to maintain the battery bank and run radios/phone system/computer when they weren't.)

But they didn't want to spend the money. Said they just wanted better inverters. So I installed stacked Trace SW5548's. They loved those mainly because of the competent generator management that the SW series provided; they didn't have to worry about figuring out when to start the generator any more. However, the sudden availability of 11kW (with generator support) meant they went out and bought new radios/fridges etc and killed off the battery bank completely. So they wanted to replace that. They didn't want to spend the money on good batteries so we went with 8 T105's. (4s2p) I laid out a battery box, put the base down and told the owner to get his "repair guy" to finish the rest.

Then I was away for two weeks, and came back to discover that they had expanded it to 16 T105's and built the box around them, I explained why that was a bad idea, but it worked and it let them run longer so they figured it was a win. Back then MPPT controllers weren't really available so I just used Trace C40's with 48 volt strings of solar. About once a month the DZO would find a "great deal" on a 48V string, and he'd buy them and have his repair guy mount them on the frame. Then I'd wire them into the system.

For all its faults and haphazard expansion the system worked pretty well. We went through a long string of gasoline, then diesel, then LPG generators before finding a Cummins that seemed to last forever. The system ran for about eight years. Towards the end the repair guy was getting sloppy about watering the batteries, and we had to replace the entire bank at least once that I remember. (I think they did it quietly a second time; they probably didn't want another lecture about how stupid it was to use four strings of cheap batteries for this application.)

Then the DZO got another deal (he was always getting "great deals") and he replaced the entire thing with two identical Cummins 40KW generators, and he'd just shut down the entire DZ every night. I ended up inheriting the entire system, and those parts served as the basis for a few other systems.

I didn't mind the work. I was there anyway and often had time on my hands, waiting for a training segment to complete or the fog to lift. It was an early learning experience that taught me a lot about solar - mainly what not to do.

[Mike90250]

..... It was an early learning experience that taught me a lot about solar - mainly what not to do.

That's the take-away !