We have been hunting around for a suitable Solar Panels to fit up inside our Skylight for the last couple of months and finally have discovered a particular source that is fairly close to the required size of 1200mm by 1030mm. Of course, when we had designed our Skylight ten years ago, we had the bright idea of building our own solar panels by buying the actual silicon wafers themselves and assembling them into a flat grid to capture the sunshine etc. because the price of the factory built panels were very high in those days. But in ten years, the price has fallen off the cliff like a large rock and it no longer made any practical sense to make our own ones when we could buy a fully working panel for peanuts! But because of economies of scale these smaller 200W panels cost more than the more popular 400W large panels!
New-panels-for-skylight
These panels are the closest we could find to fit our windows but there is a narrow strip where it doesn’t quite cover the transparent part of the window. We will just fill in the gaps with insulation foam board pieces.
We have ordered eleven panels for our eleven windows, each generating around the nominal 200Watts so that means another 2200Watts of energy, to add to our solar system.
Fit-panels-into-these-gaps
Down-this-side-of-the-skylight
To convert the Solar energy into suitable voltages for charging our battery packs, we bought two solar chargers, to produce either 12Volts or 50Volts. We can select which battery we would like to charge depending on whether it needs topping up or not.
Solar-charge-controllers
We will connect the panels into 2 strings of 4 panels and 1 string of 3 panels.
This concludes the purchasing of all our Solar Panels and equipment, completing our investment into going Green and trying to reduce our dependency on the incredibly high electricity prices.