How to Wire Solar Panels in Series Parallel

everybody is named for explore stat life I teach people how to build DIY campers and in this video I'm going to teach you how to wire solar panels in a series parallel configuration now this video it's episode number nine in a series of videos where I'm teaching you all the basic electrical skills you'll need to tackle the next electrical project in your camper now I've already talked about how to make mc4 connectors had to check voltages using a multimeter how to wire solar panels in series and how to wire solar panels in parallel in previous videos which are concepts that are very important to understand before watching this video so if you haven't already seen those you should probably check those out and I'll leave links to those in the video description below let's get started why are you solar panels in series parallel is just a matter of connecting the positive and negative wires for neighboring solar panels together creating individual series wires solar panels strings and then wiring those series wired strings in parallel by connecting the positive and negative of each series string to an MC for combiner to the wires that will go to the charge controller now for the example of today's video I'm going to be wiring up for 100 watt rich solar panels in series parallel I've got them right over here I've already used my multimeter to determine which wires are positive and which wires are negative and noted that with a bit of red heat shrink on the positive wires and cover the panel's with cardboard so I'm not working with live voltage [Music] now first I want to wire the outside pairs together in series that means wearing the positive to the negative on these two panels and wiring the positive to the negative on these two panels now I have two pairs of panels wired in series next I need to wire these two series where it strings in parallel and to do that I'm going to take all the positives from each series wired string of solar panels and attach them to a two-to-one nc4 combiner then I'm going to take all of the negatives from each series wired string of solar panels and attach them to another MC for combiner then I can attach each positive and negative MC for combiner to the wires that will go through the roof and connect to the charge controller now if the array needed to have fuses I would attach the MC four fuses to the positive MC 4 connector between the combiner and the panel wires now some arrays need fuses some don't you can rely on my free wiring diagrams to show you when to use them or not but we'll be covering the Y in a future video so consider subscribing now if you have more than 4 panels the theory is completely the same if we had 6 solar panels they could be wired in a three panels in series with the two series strings in parallel or they could be wired two panels in series with the 3 series strings wired in parallel more panels same concept if you had 16 panels you could do series strings of 4 panels with the 4 series strings wired in parallel now something to note all series strings really need to be identical so 5 solar panels cannot be wired in series parallel because it's not recommended to have an array with a series string of 2 panels wired in parallel with a serious string of 3 solar panels now why would we want to wire our solar panels in series parallel series parallel allows us to keep the voltage from our solar panel array high enough for the MPPT charge controller to effectively do its job but low enough to stay under the max voltage rating of the charge controller it also allows us to keep the solar panel array amps low enough so that we can effectively use smaller wire throughout the entire array without worrying about excessive voltage drop but we're going to talk about that in much more detail in next week's video now I hope you found this video helpful and if you did it'd be awesome if you'd share it with somebody or a group who you think could benefit from it leave this video a thumbs up drop any questions you've got in the comment section below subscribe if you want to see more DIY camper building tutorials and I will see you in the next video

Channel: EXPLORIST life - DIY Campers

Views: 72,655

Rating: 4.9397535 out of 5

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Id: b2H8vpj8rQg

Length: 4min 3sec (243 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020