How Far Can You Run Solar Cables | Avoiding Line losses

now if you're planning out a DIY solar setup where your solar panels are going to be quite a distance away from the rest of your equipment like your charge controller your battery your inverter or a portable power station like I'm using today you really need to account for the line loss in that distance of cable that you need to run from your panels all the way to your equipment for this instance we have 400 watts of panels but I can't consider that I'm going to get that same capability all the way at my equipment because I have 185 feet of cabling that needs to travel through and that means we have some line losses so let me show you this exact setup and then we're going to go through a few different trials showing you what factors you can tweak and change to minimize the line losses and get the right setup for your needs so the setup today for the test is four 100 watt Thunderbolt panels from Harbor Freight each of these produce 18 volts at 5.6 amps kind of that maximum PowerPoint condition I have the front two wired in parallel the back two wired in pair parallel and then bringing those together in series right into a power analyzer which gives me my voltage amperage and overall the Watt hours that we accumulate through the test at this point and then I have that same power analyzer on the other end right next to the ecoflow Delta Pro where we're actually Landing this power and storing that in the battery and then connecting these two ends is 185 feet of 10 gauge solar wire this is both approved for direct burial and it's solar resistant so it won't degrade and direct sunlight over time you'll see a link below in the description for your reference for this 10 gauge wire but also 8 gauge and 12 gauge that I've tested over time and also any other parts or tools that we're using in these videos just in case that will help you out on your own projects now when it comes to wire most of us understand the maximum continuous current 10 gauge would have a maximum of 30 amps 12 gauge would have a maximum of 20 amps and then 14 gauge would have a maximum of 15 amps but that is the maximum when we are running long stretches of wire we really have to understand line loss because you can have considerable losses between your solar panels what you're producing right here compared to where you're Landing that 100 or in this instance 185 feet away absolutely something you need to consider and there are online calculators which will give you a good estimate as you're planning out your different projects and I'll show you one that will estimate what we would get in losses here then we'll compare that to the real world results and change a few variables to see if we can't reduce the line losses using the same 10 gauge wire and I tried to keep the majority of the wire in the grass opposed just laying it across the concrete from the solar panel end over to the Eco flow so after that run then we landed like we said in the ecoflow Delta Pro super capable unit here that I use for a lot of these different tests the power analyzer here is just a radio controlled power analyzer you'd use this on drones quite often so it is quite limited it can only go to 100 volts maximum voltage now it has a lot of amperage capability but that's what really limits me in these tests is I can only go up to 100 volts so I know many of you have asked in the past why don't you just put everything in series opposed a wiring in parallel well sometimes that is the limitation of the power analyzer during the test and The Way We compare is I use Watt hours why I use Watt hours is because I can't just do a point test to see a voltage and a current at any given time on this end and then run over to the under end and compare that that would just be a spot check and especially on days like this where it's partly cloudy and you have clouds moving in and out it wouldn't be a fair comparison because I might have full sunlight here walk over there and it might have a little bit of cloud cover which is going to completely throw those two points off so I like to do is have the solar panel and running accumulating energy over a duration of time and then compare that same number to how much energy we've actually stored at this end what you would expect is you're going to get much less here we're getting a voltage drop throughout those wires predominantly Associated to how much current we're pushing through the wires so as we'll see in the results current and how much current you're pushing through the wires is really something you need to look out for now let's get an estimate of what we expect our power loss to be and compare that to our real world results and then you can reference right below the video you might have to press more depending on desktop or mobile and you can go over to the calculator now we're using copper I'm going to change that to 10 gauge right because that's what we're using we are two wires so we'll set that at two wire now remember the Thunderbolts are 18 volts but we have two in parallel and two in series so I need to take 36 volts which is the maximum I should be seeing today we have 185 feet of wire and that's just one way you don't need to add up the positive and the negative just one way it's already built in and then our overall amperage maximum would be 11.2 but this would be let's calculate that this would be if I'm running at the maximum PowerPoint perfect sun everything ideal and that's simply not the case during this duration of test if that were the case and I was putting out right at 400 watts I would expect with this 185 feet of 10 gauge to have 14.3 percent loss and that comes from the 5.15 volts of drop from the start to the Finish from the solar panels to the ecoflow that is a lot you'd want to stay below five percent and ideally even in the three percent range would be kind of in that professionally installed system category now for this test we're not going to be doing 11.2 for the whole time because it is partly cloudy and that's really dropping down voltage a little bit and dropping down amperage or the current substantially so I would use more like seven throughout the duration of this test and I'll keep the voltage at the same so I'm expecting about a nine percent about 8.9 percent voltage drop this is from my estimator and now I want to compare that to the actual results that we got throughout this multi-hour test on a partly cloudy day so our first test run is completed it ran for about three hours and the results are in now we can compare to our estimation how close were we estimate compared to real world and on a side note you can see behind me I have my in-phase combiner box finally on my home my 11 kilowatts of solar has went on the southern facing side of my roof and now all we need is the utility to come reprogram the smart meter to commission it and no longer will I have a monthly power bill now if you guys are considering solar for your own home and now is just about as good as time as any with federal state and even some municipalities having incentives I know in the state of Illinois it's a fantastic time and after about a year I'll get a 60 to 65 percent of my system cost back but as a first step a perfect place to start is estimating the size of system and the cost of that Associated system so you'll see a link in the description right below the video you can jump over to where I started this process to figure out what I needed you put in a little information on your power bill and your home itself and then you'll quickly get an estimate on what you're looking at to see if that makes sense for you this year or maybe next year you can start the planning process to get solar on your own home so when it came to this test I have this spreadsheet with the results I took an image of the two power analyzers the one at the panel had accumulated 587 Watt hours so at the panels we accumulated 587 Watt hours of energy throughout the duration of the test but then we had line losses right so at the Eco flow we only saw 537. what's pretty impressive is if you look at that loss that's an 8.5 percent loss and we estimated 8.9 so it was a pretty good comparison now just remember we did lower that current to match this partly cloudy day so if I were to use that 36 volts and 11.2 I would have had over a 14 loss so there would have been a little bit of a difference there if I would have taken that maximum PowerPoint voltage and current for the system but again that is still high I wouldn't necessarily want the system running with that much line loss it is your own decision but I would want to do something different and a very easy thing here if my charge controller or my eco flow could handle it is putting all four of these panels in series opposed to series parallel like we had it before so what that would do is it would just add up to 18 volts across the four panels so we would have 72 volts and then the 5.6 amp so we'd be lowering that current and should be also lowering the associated line loss because we're not putting as much current through the wires so I'm already running that test I'm going to let it run for a little bit longer and then we'll see what is the percentage that we got here and I'll also do another estimation to see what that estimate would be so I had a little issue with that test so I reconfigured it here for kind of the last Sun of the day ran a 30 minute test with these all in series so we really stepped down the amperage what I used for the calculator was 3.5 amps at that 72 volt and the calculator gave me a 2.2 percent line loss so substantially less with that line loss in this series configuration and that goes to show you if you can wire in series wire in series that's really going to bring down your line losses and keep your cost of wiring lower running from your panels to your charge controller or your portable power station so on that second run the actual results for just the 30 min a trial at the panel we got 62 Watt hours and then at the ecoflow we got 61 Watt hours so we really only lost one watt hour between the two points which resulted in 1.6 percent drop so you can see this substantially brought down our losses now we were starting to bring down our amperage the sun was getting lower in the sky So that obviously also helps but that series configuration with the higher voltage lower amperage is going to really help you out with the line losses let me know what you guys think and also if you guys know any other power analyzers or any other data collection equipment that you've seen you think works well for those types of projects I'm trying to step that up I really want to invest a little bit more in data collection and actually graphing these and overlaying these trials if you have any recommendations throw them down below this video in the comments and I always greatly appreciate your guys's feedback now if you want to see a similar test but testing 8 gauge 10 gauge and 12 gauge check out this video right here we'll test the 100 feet sections across those 3 three different gauges and show you the results so thanks for joining me on this video and we'll catch you on that next one take care

Channel: Everyday Solar

Views: 24,370

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Id: 1m24B_DngBs

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 25 2023