DIY 9kW Grid Tie Ground Based Home Solar Panel System Installation

good morning my name is David just an everyday homeowner I wanted to have solar I got several quotes and the prices I got were okay I mean it would pay for itself but it took a little longer to pay off than I wanted to and I finally decided I would just go ahead and do it myself package for the panels and electrical equipment from wholesale solar and a racking system from ready rack it's just screws that screw into the ground so it's really easy to put in wholesale solar was able to provide me with a package that would give me the output that I wanted and all the components that went together to provide that and that made it really easy for me they were also able to provide diagrams for the inspectors and permit process I was able to put this whole system together for considerably less than it would cost to have it installed my payoff for the system I expect to be around nine years although it's been producing a little bit more than I anticipated so that might be less and I expect to get an eleven to twelve percent return on my investment I'm really happy with what it's producing for me okay materials are finally arrived here's twenty four mission solar 375 watt panels on one pallet and here we have the inverter and Mike motors and other components in the box alright let's take a look at it what's inside the boxes here we have a box of tea 400 the power optimizer there will be one for each panel we have 24 panels so there's 24 optimizers in this box we have our seven points six kilowatt inverter and this is an Eevee ready inverter so we'll be able to charge our solar our electric vehicle directly from solar power alright in this box we have some miscellaneous components more power optimizers box an MC 4 connector release tool and some strain relief adapters here we have a bag of caution labels for our solar system our ground bus bar some clips or manual disconnect box to disconnect from the utility and over here we have a ground stabilization fabric that we'll use to put under the solar panels we'll put some rocks on that and that'll keep us from having to maintain any foilage that might grow up underneath the panel's and over here we have our 375 watt mission solar PV modules there are 24 modules on this pallet each one of these modules is 375 watts minus zero plus 3% and here you can see the specifications each one of them comes with a connection that we'll use to connect the panels in a string through the power optimizers and we'll lift one of these up so you can see the front side of the panels alright so now let's take a look at some of the other components that will need to complete the installation all right I've gathered together a few of the other components we're gonna need in the back corner here I have my six gauge bare copper here I have two 500 foot spools of 10 gauge th H n that will run through our conduit those will run from our combiner box back to the house here I have some 10 gauge UV stable solar wire that I will use to make the connections from the solar strings to the combiner box here we have a package of mc4 connectors MC for crimper tool some elbows and connector pieces for the conduit and then we have several hundred feet of conduit that will run underground from the combiner box to the house here are the materials for the ready system all the pipes came on a pallet and we'll just need to assemble those alright we have a couple of boxes that came with our ready rack system first box we have our helix screw that's gonna go on the end of our anchor pipes and we have a box of those and we have a box of just hardware connection cables support system covers for the ends of the rack pipes [Applause] boxes of connecting pipes alright here are all the parts we're going to use to assemble everything this is the bracket for the end of the solar panel this is the grounding lug for the optimizer this is the mid metal bracket goes between each panel this is a grounding lug this is the release for the cable ties just an allen wrench and here is our grounding strap that goes between our panels this is the kit for cable tying the poles together alright here we are finding our true South using high noon and a level and a rod and what we did is we marked the base of our rod and then at high noon which today was 138 we marked the tip of the shadow you can see her on the chickens we marked the tip of the shadow with a flag and that is going to allow us to exactly orient our solar array with south all right so we have marked our posts along the straight edge every eight foot six inches all the way down to the farthest corner right so to get our other corner we use the triangulation method and we use another tape measure just to make sure the edge is exactly the right distance apart the mark the fourth corner of our array and that will mark out the backside post or in this case the south side posts all right we've laid out flags along the south side straight engine now we have a flag position for each post in a straight line all parallel and perpendicular line and everything aligned with our north-south shadow that we produced [Music] so the first step in the process will be to put the auger or the screw on the end of the lower shaft and that's what we will drive into the ground so we have a 3/8 bolt here and we'll just go ahead and assemble that okay now we'll go ahead and assemble the two parts of the screw they screw end with the lower shaft now we have our entire screw assemble I just need to tighten that bolt top let's go ahead and tighten that bolt up okay there we have it four screw ready I want to use my post a digger to drive these screws and having a doctor for that risk the shock [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] we'll just go ahead and cut it to length we have the solar panels are gonna stick out three feet and then I would like but beyond that [Music] [Music] and now we'll spread it down and push through [Music] all right there we go Patrick's down then we just eats fruits and gravel [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] got the gravel spread out I'll pack them now I've left this corner undone so that when I trench my line in I don't have to go all the gravel back [Music] so a quick solution to move these brackets up and down is just take a socket that's just a little bit larger and slide it in there that makes it loose and then we can slide it easily up and down to the height that we want it at in this case five and a quarter pop it out that stays right where we want it just a simple quick way to move around all right we're gonna go ahead and put in a cross brace and I set up this clamp at five and a quarter inches up from the base of this screw go ahead and just one of our bolts put it through into the self-tapping part of the claim and set that one right here you want to make sure our level is plump and it looks like it's right on all right now we can slide the upper bracket down to make the brace match until the hole lines up and the pole is exactly plumb once we have that achieved then we can go ahead and put our bolt in and tighten that up with our impact driver okay now that brace is secured and we can type go back and tighten up the other side we go cross braces in and that makes sure that our front sight post is now we're gonna go ahead and put our north/south purlins on we're gonna use the lower set of holes that corresponds to our target of 30 degrees and we'll do the same for the top the first thing we'll do is temps at the lower mounting point using the center hole since our vertical posts are very close to perfectly plumb we should be able to get pretty close to our angle just starting with the nominal position so after Tim setting that we'll go ahead and move to the top and put our bolt in the lower set of holes and then we can check our angle and see how close we are our angle gauge shows that we are 20 we are 29.5 about so about half a degree off we can just make a slight adjustment to that right now I can see that my vertical pull is basically plumb by moving our mount point just one hole position that'll change the angle and there we go were exactly thirty degrees so we'll go ahead and tighten those mount points and we'll move on to the next one now we're going to install the cross cables we've already installed one on the Southside that goes from lower left to upper right so we'll do the exact opposite here for this north side of the assembly there's a premade loop we'll go ahead and temp set that bolt on the bottom then we will run the cable through our little turnbuckle and there's arrows on it they'll show you which way to send it through it easily slides in one side and back out the other we just want to make sure we maintain at least a four inch loop through the bolt I can slide my bolt through the loop and then go ahead and pre tension the cable these cables don't have to be super tight they've just motion limiting cables so once I have that snugged up I can put my level on the post make sure it's plumb just make any slight adjustments that I need to to get it exactly where I want it and once we're there perfect we'll just go ahead and tighten up the bolts the rest of the way and I can zip tie or cut off the remaining cable just to keep it out of the way and we'll just continue doing that for the rest of the openings now we need to go ahead and run our east/west purlins and these come with a joining bracket it has a nice snug fit we just slide them in and line up the holes there's four bolts that we need to shoot to put it together you can put these together on the ground or up in place whatever is easiest for you okay zip that up on its side alright now let's set it up in place so I'm about to put the purlins on but before I do we take a look at the shadow going north/south all the shadows are perfectly aligned so that tells us it's Heinen and that tells us that our system is aligned through north-south now I'm gonna take these special nuts this one goes up inside the channel and this one will hold down the top and I've got my east-west purling on here and we've splice it together and rested one end up there and for the size of my cells we need to use this hole and we have a 38 inch maximum overhang so we've got 38 inches from our north-south pearl into our east-west purling we know we can set it here so now I'll just go ahead and put the nut up in the channel all right now we'll put the rest in and tighten them up now that we have the racking system all put together we will start putting on the solar panels [Music] all right what we're gonna do now is start to connect our string I'm going to leave space for one extra panel here but for now we'll we'll consider this as the end of the string the first step is to connect our panel to our optimizer our panel has a label a plus and a minus but the connectors on the ends are already set up to match with the optimizer so it's pretty hard to mess it up so the first step would be to connect all of the solar panels to the optimizers we're going to leave space for a little loop of wire that we can secure with a zip tie and then we'll just go ahead and connect the panel to the optimizer by sliding in the connector until it snaps for both of those those are nice and tight and then what we can do is just take a zip tie feed it through our channel and secure it there sorry wires are nice and neat so let's go ahead and connect all of the solar panels to the optimizers and then we'll come back and connect the optimizers in series right so the Sun has come out the panels are warming up we know we're producing power since we have each one of our panels connected to an optimizer the optimizer is gonna control that voltage to about one volt so that it's safe and no one get in gets injured we can show that by taking the output of our optimizer and ammeter and just checking the voltage coming out of the optimizer and here are meters showing one point zero five one point zero six volts when we connect them all together then we'll be able to connect the voltage at the end of the string and it should equal the number of panels so in this case twelve panels it should say twelve volts that's how we know each one is supplying power to the string so we'll check that once we get it all connected okay we've connected up all of our solar panels to our optimizers we've secured our wires to the rail to make sure everything's neat and tidy so as we walk down you can see that we have our optimizer wires hanging down all the solar panel wires connected to the optimizers now that all of those are connected we can move on to making our optimizer string connection so let's go back to the end of our string here now the optimizer output has a plus and a minus on my optimizer is marked on the bottom and the outside wires plus and the inside wires - and I'm going to set this - wire over this rail just so I remember that that is going to be the end of my stream and will eventually run a long wire from here all the way back to our combiner box I'm going to take our positive wire that comes out the other side and we'll connect it to the negative wire of our next optimizer now we're gonna make one string across the bottom which is 12 panels and then we'll make one string across the top which is an additional 12 panels in order to do that we'll just connect these up I'll make a loop and my wire so it's easy to secure and then we'll just snap that together and zip tie it up to our rail then I'll take the positive wire from the next optimizer connect it to the negative of the next one on the string make a loop in my wire connect those together until I hear a click and I can bundle that up and secure it to my rail with a zip tie then I'll take the positive from this optimizer connect it to the negative of the next so we'll just go down the line doing that so let's go ahead and do it alright we've connected all of the optimizers end-to-end for each of our strings we've left the negative end of our lower string hanging here and the negative end of our upper string hanging here now if we make our way down to the other end each optimizer is connected in a row positive to negative all the way down the string in a line for the top row and the bottom row and we get back to the other end we have the positive end of our lower string and the positive end of our upper string hanging out on this end now these two will connect into a combiner box that we'll have here and for the negative ends we'll make a long cable that connects that end of the string all the way back down here to come into our combiner box so we'll go ahead and make those parts okay now that we've connected all of our strings in a line we need to connect one long cable to this end of our optimizer at the end of the string which is our negative connection on this optimizer and we have purchased some 10 gauge Sun resistant flexible 2000 volt wire in order to make this connection and put our own connector on the end this wire runs all the way down the string to where we're gonna put our combiner box on and so all we need to do is put a little loop here for our slack and make our connection to the end of the string and then I can secure that to the rail with a zip tie all right so that wire runs all the way down the length of our string and our combiner box now we have the positive running out of the last optimizer and we'll have this cable carrying the negative from the first optimizer and that'll be the ends of our string so we'll have four wires two from each string four wires coming into our box plus a ground and that's at that combiner box we will bring all that in and connect to our ten gauge wires that will run underground all the way to the house all right we're going to use a unique grounding system on this array rather than putting a lug on each panel and running a number six ground wire down the whole length we're gonna use these grounding strips these are Dyna Bond 8-inch grounding strips it's a copper tin coated copper wire with a stainless steel crimp on each end and all we have to do is connect each panel to the one next to it just use a little rubber mallet and now this panel is connected to this one and we'll just go ahead and make our way down the entire string connecting one panel to the next and that will be our grounding system at the end we'll connect a lug to the end panel and run that all the way through to the building for our final number six ground let's do a quick walk around all the wires are tied up underneath all the panels have been mounted as we walk down the side you can see a little space at the end so if I want to extend the system the racks already there all the wires are neatly zip tied underneath all the optimizers are connected and everything is ready to connect to our combiner box once we dig the trench to the house okay so we're gonna start to put together the combiner box for all the wires coming out of the array I'm going to use this waterproof plastic box as a seal on the top four mounting screws on the backside and we're gonna drill some holes in it to put our conduit couplings in and we'll also put Glanton to receive our number ten wire coming out of the solar array each one of those takes two wires and then I have a small one to put number six ground in and then to mount it to our array I'm going to use this bracket that's designed for a gate and I just mounted it to a scrap piece of PVC so I don't have to worry about it rotting and once I get all of the adapters mounted into my box we'll just go ahead and mount that right to the PVC and right to the hole and then we'll be able to run our conduit up out of the ground into that combiner box so let's drill the holes and put it together all right so we have drilled our holes in our box and mounted all of our connectors the large ones are silicone just to make sure they're sealed and don't leak and I decided to put everything coming in to the bottom of the box just to make sure I don't have any water sitting on my fittings I can make a loop in my wire so the water drips off before it gets to it everything is mounted and ready to go so now we can attach it to our back plate and put it on our pole okay so we put all of our attachments in the bottom side of our box mounted the box to our PVC a little spacer to hold it out from the pipe brackets attached to the pipe now we know exactly where to trench our lines and we're ready to run all of our wires and conduit okay so we're laying out the conduit all the way from here to the solar array and we're running a rope through the end I just tie the rope to the end of a stake drop it through the tube a little extra running out the end here so the ropes going all the way through now we're going to make up the joints and have the conduits all ready to go when we run the trench okay we have our rope running through our line so now we're gonna go ahead and make up the joints with some PVC cement walk through here we go why that was way in there that's nice [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay we pulled our wire through our conduit laid the conduit down in the trench and now we are pulled extra wire out the end and we're gonna put the ones together they go out the side of the building and over to that hole so that we can pull the wire through that okay we've got our conduit connected up to our combiner box we've pulled our wires through all right things run and our ditch at least 18 inches deep most of the way is 24 have some sticks placed in there so we can bury it and the inspector will be able to see how deep it is in this one spot I couldn't turn as tight as I wanted to with the machine so we had to pull out cut kind of a 45 across the corner but that worked out fine the pipe lays nicely in an arc all the way to the building we have two lines one for any future expansion I'm just capped off the other ones gonna run up the side of the building and into the garage where we're running through the wall over to the inverter so now we're ready to bury our line okay we have combined our two strings and we have the positive and negative ends down here and we can check to make sure that everything is providing power appropriately the meter shows twelve point three volts it should be about one volt per panel we have twelve panels so we know that that string is connected properly and all the optimizers are working so we can go ahead and connect them up you're working quite wise all right we are gonna make our connection with our solar panel we're gonna use these waterproof connectors the ends of our array of wires and the conductors pulling up out of our conduit right now we have a safe working voltage of 12 volts okay let's see the group coming out of the backside of the nuts then used a seal waterproof the connection alright now we can pack those all back in the box close it up our connection is made now we have a connection made at our combiner box and at the we'll be able to okay we have our two strings all connected up connect it into our combiner box in the bottom a little loop in the wires so we don't have to worry about water running into our box conduit goes into the ground empty for future and one with our for number Ten's and ground wire running back to the house mines berry with some sticks and the grounds inspector knows the depth I just have to fire it up alright so here we have our meter panel and right on the edge of the wall so we'll need to put our disconnect box right underneath it so that we can have our AC come into the box and then it will go into this panel and I'll safety disconnect okay so we've wired up our disconnect our wiring for the garage our two hot lines run through the disconnect and then through a conduit into the breaker box next to a 40 amp breaker this disconnect will have a physical on and off so that the solar can be disconnected from the grid physically at that point and that way the line workers will be safe we just need to connect to our garage oK we've pulled our wires through our conduit we have them coming out the wall we hung a piece of sheetrock and painting behind where the box is gonna go my wires coming out of our conduit is going up into the unit so now we're just going to mark the bracket location on the wall and then mount it up there and make our final connections and wires we mark the location for where we're gonna hang our inverter and hung the brackets on the wall now we just need to mount it and connect our wires alright so we put a screwdriver into the release bar for the neutral terminal and we slide our wire into their release it that it's nice and tight do the same for our hot leg do our remaining leg okay now we have all of our AC wires connected the bus and now we'll do our string wires to the DC bus okay I have put a little piece of tape on these two conductors so that I can keep track of which string is which back at the combiner box this is our first string and we will connect left a little bit of slack here so that I can have extra in case I need to redo something we are gonna connect to the DC terminal block we'll put this string in the top screw driver end make sure it's tight star driver Han that's first string we'll do the same for the second okay here we have it all of our AC and DC lines connected into our terminal block alright there's an activation card that we need to put into the inverter in order for it to operate the serial number matches the serial number on our inverter so we took the faceplate off and there's a slot right above the display that the card goes into I take it out of the bag and slide it into the slot and it just clicks in like a SD card I'm sure that this zip tie doesn't push on it alright and that's all we need to do okay we decided to hardwire our Ethernet so we put in an Ethernet jack right below the inverter ran the patch cable through passageway and connected it to the Ethernet connection on the board so now we have Ethernet and all of our other wires connected we can put the cover back on okay we put the panel back on went through the startup protocol everything is up and running we are running at about 7,000 watts looks like a cloud just came over we're finally producing power back to the grid we did it and you can do it too

Channel: Projects With Everyday Dave

Views: 534,443

Keywords: 9kW, ground based, Solar panel system installation, DIY Solar panel system, DIY Solar panels for home, Self Install solar panels, self install solar, residential solar, how to install solar panels yourself, grid tie, solar panels, solar racking system, wholesale Solar, Ready Rack, Screw anchors, solar panel orientation, off grid, Unbound Solar, solar analytics, solar racking, solar system, off grid solar system, 9.4kw, Solar panel, DIY Solar Panels, Purchasing solar panels

Id: _xA6qOwnYbM

Length: 49min 8sec (2948 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020