An Overview of My Solar System, featuring a Harbor Freight Thunderbolt 100 WATT Solar Panel

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Off-grid electricity has been of interest for some time. As solar power becomes more and more efficient there has never been a better time to start a solar power project. Rewind 10 years the overall efficiency was not there or at-least for the price of today's solar panels.

In 2010 we put up a 45 WATT string of panels form harbor freight. These panels were sold as a kit and included a charge controller. This kit was north of $250.00 USD at that time. Shortly after installation the charge controller failed, however the three 15 watt thin film solar panels remained on the roof. The project was hung up at that time as it was just to costly to simply power a couple of lights.

Fast forward to 2023 the original harbor freight panels still remain on the roof and put out a voltage! That's 2.0 amps of DC electricity wasted! Why not install a charge controller that actually works, hook up a couple batteries, add a couple more panels and power up some lights and WIFI?

Here is an overview of my current solar system

• 3 x Harbor Freight 15 WATT Thin film panels. Should be about 45 watts combined under full sun light. Each panel produces 21 volts relatively solidly so long as the sun is up. Averages about 20 watts but can reach 90%+ efficiency.
• 2 x Harbor Freight 100 WATT Thunderbolt monocrystalline panels. Massive improvement from the original thin film panels. Should produce 100 watts per panel under ideal sunlight, has produced up to 110+ watts or 6 AMPS at 19 volts for us. One of these panels produce on average about 3.0 amps at a time accounting for cloudy weather.
  
  
• 2 x 30 AMP MPPT Solar Charge Controllers off eBay/Amazon. Excellent buy for the money spent. Purchased off eBay for $15.00 free shipping however it is worth noting that "VERSION B" has more functionality. Version B will allow a custom voltage for the load discharge to stop so as to prevent any damage to the battery. The original version also has this same functionality however it cuts off at 11.5 VOLTS which is of damaging level to a lead acid battery.
  
  
• 2 24F 585 CCA Everstart Lead Acid Car batteries. This is where things get salty, 2 car batteries from Walmart at 70$ / pc.
• All of the solar panels are mounted to the roof using 100% silicone caulk.

Why does my system have 2 charge controllers?

This system has 2 controllers because the controllers are very affordable. Additionally, this provides double the wattage capacity of just one controller so that additional solar panels can be added on a residual basis as funds become available. Also it makes things more efficient so that the thin-film panels and the monocrystalline panels are in separate strings.

What this solar system can do

This solar system operates three 16 ft. LED light strips to provide outdoor lighting, a WIFI access point, and a security camera all operating on 12 volts. View lighting in action here!

What I am not doing with solar

This is a very useful solar application for under 500$ however it will not be powering an entire house anytime soon. Additionally it will not be feeding electricity into the grid.