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A bifacial panel is only half-installed when the modules are bolted down, because the whole point of paying for glass on both sides is the light that comes up from underneath — and that depends entirely on what you put on the ground. This is the part most backyard installs ignore, and in my case

The MC4 connector is probably the most reviled electrical connector in modern use–and it’s not the connector’s fault. We’re going to cover more than just the MC4, and the basics here apply to almost everything you want to connect in power electrics/electronics. I’ve read hundred of posts in solar forums, and on facebook, about making

If you’re going to use more than one inverter to power your home or business you might know what I’m talking about, and if you’re doing a three phase system with three inverters than you almost certainly do. There’s a lot more to building a multi-inverter system than buying inverters and batteries. They need to

The panels are the part people photograph. The rack, the neat rows, the glint of glass — that’s the money shot. But the decisions that actually make or break a solar build often happen in the unglamorous space between the array and the inverter, where a calculation you get wrong can cook a $3,000 inverter

Panels fail almost never unless you do something stupid to them. Inverters mostly die of old age or a lightning hit. The part that actually burns solar arrays down is the one nobody photographs and everybody underestimates: the little plastic connector on the end of the wire. It’s the cheapest component in the whole system

In the last post I got 30 bifacial panels mounted straight and neat on the Chiko rack. But a bifacial panel is only half-installed when the modules are bolted down, because the whole point of paying for glass on both sides is the light that comes up from underneath — and that depends entirely on

My particular installation might serve as a useful guideline for yours, even if you elect to do a DIY rack. For various reasons I decided not to do mine DIY, mostly because I was concerned that I’d need an engineering stamp to pass local codes and land use planning requirements. Perhaps I actually didn’t. When

This is what I posted on Facebook: New plan. I’ve been considering pumping my solar channel by doing better videos. But that means less getting stuff done and more screwing with videos. So no. Instead I’m going to do short posts to ExpertAmateur.com, my blog, showing what I’m up to, and short, crappy videos with

so my newest EMS/Detection/Fire Resilience experiment is implementing the system at my home and my shop in Hood River. I previously stated that once I had the prototype of the project files to dump into Claude, that it only took four hours to implement. That was misleading–I took four hours to get the integrated software