A note about HARBOR FREIGHT Solar Panel SAE Connectors

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The harbor freight 100 WATT Thunderbolt panel comes with a SAE connector on about 3 ft. of cord. These SAE connectors make it easy to work with. Multiple cables with SAE connectors can be connected together, there by making it easy to plug-and-play and get the panel connected.

The SAE connectors are fairly common and come in on other applications. One such application is with Motorola commercial radio equipment such as the Motorola Radius or MAXTRAC series radios. The cables made for the Motorola products are heavy duty and come with a 15 AMP fuse.

A check on eBay will show that there are a lot of cheap Motorola power cables. Most of the cables marketed for Motorola radio equipment come with an inline fuse, the fuse itself and most importantly the cables are long making it ideal for solar applications.

Although harbor freight actually sells a separate kit with a SAE extension cable, this does not factor in an inline fuse and the extension itself is only 10 ft long. In my solar setup I utilized the SAE extension kit from harbor freight + a Motorola power cable from eBay by plugging one end of the extension cable into the solar panel and the other end into the eBay cable.

This made it so I would not have to splice the extension cable itself and the Motorola cable form eBay comes already spliced so that it can be plugged directly into the charge controller.

Here is a photo of my "SAE Cables" running into the charge controller.