00:00Hey everyone and welcome back to the channel. My name is Danner and I've been renovating this
00:05once abandoned Home Depot shed into a tiny house with the help of my dad. Earlier this year we
00:11began constructing this eight panel solar array. We've been using this all summer with our EG4
00:17mini split and plan to do some more testing with it with the EG4 18kbv. In this video I want
00:23to
00:23show you how we constructed this solar ground mount and mounted the eight panels to it. This
00:28all begins late last year when we ordered a pallet of 36 panels from Signature Solar. These are 460
00:36watt blue sun bifacial panels and that means in addition to the 460 watts from the solar on the
00:43front side they can also have a 25% gain with the reflected light on the back side which gives
00:49us
00:49575 watts. Now there are more efficient lighter and stylish panels out there but this option allowed
00:57us to have the most kilowatts for the dollar. It is cheaper per panel when you buy an entire pallet.
01:03Also panels there's lots of different manufacturers, brands, styles and they're constantly going in and
01:10out of stock. We didn't really need all the panels right now at the start but we did want all
01:15of our
01:16panels to match so we just thought it would be better to go ahead and buy more than we need
01:20and
01:21just have them ready just to kind of future proof. But there are some things to consider in buying the
01:26panels especially just the whole shipping process. First of all these are very heavy over 2,000 pounds.
01:35We actually have some friends at a local business that helped us that we were able to ship this to.
01:40They were able to move this onto our trailer with a forklift.
01:45You know what I think we're going to do? I'll tell you what I want to do is bring it
01:48out some.
01:49I'm going to do this lift gate and I'm going to get it on the lift gate where that way
01:55it ain't teetered.
01:57Does that make sense? I can lower it down.
01:59Is it still giving me an issue? Because at worst I'll just strap it to this mast up here.
02:05Yeah it's still touching on the other side. Oh it's longer than I thought it was. You can bring it
02:11out some more
02:12and I'll get this lift gate up and I can get my pallet jack there and kind of sit it
02:17on the gate
02:17and sit it down when we don't have to. Yep I got you. Or even you know I can get
02:22it when we can
02:22I can push it with the pallet jack. I just don't I couldn't do it. I didn't want to try
02:27that without
02:27something holding on this thing. It's too long. Do you have a way to rotate it in there?
02:35Well I think that's what I'm going to shoot for is get it out enough. Yeah and another way you
02:40can do it
02:41is if you've got it over here close enough I can bring this up. You can swing around and probably
02:45get
02:46it here. In the middle y'all. That good or no? Come on just a minute. You're making it.
02:55It's the best you can swing around this side and grab it right here. Yep I can let it go.
03:06I can swing around and grab it right here.
03:11Oh my goodness.
03:23Are you getting ready to ease back a little bit? Ready when you are.
03:37Let's go back here. Hold on just a second.
03:59Let me move now.
04:29Oh, my God.
04:35After we got the panels to the shed the next problem came into focus. How do we
04:40get this pile of panels off this trailer? At about 2,200 to 2,400 pounds this was
04:47more than our tractor can lift on the forks and after we unboxed them we
04:58realized that all the panels were standing up vertically. Now it makes sense
05:02why they'd ship them vertically to avoid damage but we weren't expecting it and
05:06they were sitting on this trailer in the field and we had to figure out how to get
05:10them off without the whole stack falling over like dominoes.
05:29So if you're gonna get a pallet of panels think about where you're gonna unload
05:32them. It'd be a good idea to put them up against a wall so you have something to
05:36lean them against as you unpack. We got by with this makeshift stack of pallets that
05:41we haphazardly screwed together. It got a bit sketchy at times but we managed to
05:46get them all onto this rack. We made this using a couple of pallets some plywood and
05:50some scrap lumber.
06:14And then we use strapping to keep them all held together and if you don't have one
06:18of these strapping tools it's definitely worth getting. We use it all the time
06:22with our milled lumber and in general it's just been great to use on lots of
06:25projects. What we thought was just gonna be 30 minutes of loading them over the
06:31pallet forks turned just into an entire day of getting these moved into the
06:37shipping container. So definitely something to think about before you place
06:42that order is how you're gonna where are you gonna put them and how you're gonna
06:45unload it just something to think about. So the first goal was to install four
06:50solar panels to test with our direct PV input on our eg4 mini split. We tested it
06:56over the summer and we'll have more on the results but we had this area over by
07:00our original temporary power pool and it was a great spot for a smaller temporary
07:05array. At our latitude the optimal angles range between 12 degrees in the
07:10summer and 58 degrees in the winter. We went back and forth between 20 and 30
07:16degrees with 20 being more biased to optimize for the long days of the summer and
07:2130 being a all-year best average number.
07:26Just think Dan. Think the speed square doesn't lie.
07:31We thought that starting with 30 degrees would give us a good idea of how well we
07:35could fill our battery capacity with a smaller array and when we build the
07:39larger system with some or all of the remaining 28 panels we can always lower
07:44it some and that'll make it easier to roof mount. So 20 degrees is close to a 412
07:50roof pitch.
08:043 quarters make the line 3 quarters less than every 24 inches is that right?
08:10Our original design was simple a 12 foot by 6 foot frame that would sit at a 30
08:16degree angle on four posts. We faced it due south and centered it on our power pool.
08:54We built the frame first and then we used it to mark the location of our four
08:59post holes. The center of this is gonna be about right here and this one's gonna be
09:13about right there.
09:43there.
09:46And so here.
