Experimenting and testing various small solar setups, 12v shop lights and inverters

[cstockwell]

I have setup for testing out various setups, panels, controllers and battery banks a temporary testing area in my small back wood shop.  I had purchased long ago four of the old Harbor Freight 45W solar kits that had three 15w panels and mounting bracket and hardware.  The charge controllers and lights that came with the kit were not really of much use (even back then tbh) and were tossed.  I mounted the 4 kits on the roof and then put a small solar controller and one single lead acid 18ah battery I had sitting around.  Pretty sure I ordered the wrong battery for generator or something so had it available.  You can see in the first picture it was just a quick basic setup.  I slowly upgraded the system to include a breaker shutoff for panels coming in, a battery charge monitor, usb charging ports that worked off a switch and kept making changes.  At one point I added a 2nd identical 18ah battery in parallel and later a 3rd battery to the bank.  I also changed to one single new 200watt 12v solar panel and two 100ah lead acid batteries instead of the other battery bank.  

I am by no means a solar expert but have been testing smaller setups seeing what works well and what doesn't.  I have been increasing solar setup sizes and will be doing a hybrid solar/wind turbine setup at the lake this summer.  So keep in mind you need to do your own due diligence and research when setting up your own systems.  There are so many variables at play such as solar panels, 12, 24 or 48v systems, different controllers, wire gauge sizes, etc that will affect how well your system works and what your needs are.  

I will actually be pulling the current 200 watt panel and two 100ah batteries from this setup and going back to the HF old panels and three 18ah battery bank for the shop since it is a testing setup and that setup works well for just the lighting I need.  

In the video below it is a little long because I start going over the setup in the shop but then give information about the lights used, amount of watts they draw, different inverters etc and give information of what you could expect for light run times based on the battery bank size and battery type at the end of the video.