Now we need sun for our solar panels

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Now we need sun for our solar panels

Monday, 17 October 2011 19:54

We already have a sort of "sun roof" - more commonly known as a Houdini hatch - it helps cool Epiphany in the summer heat. We have had plenty of sun this summer and some lovely sunsets.

Sunset at Reading

Why now do we want more sun .......

The hint was in the title. We spent today at Caversham Boat Services (CBS) on the River Thames.

Caversham Boat Services on Fry's Island

Over the last few months John has been extensively researching to find as much information on solar panels so we could make an informed decision as to what system to buy to get the best result. With the price of diesel bound to go up and the saving on engine hours by having an alternative source of energy to top up our leisure batteries, solar panels seemed a good investment.

Epiphany at CBS before installation

All my plants have been moved to the front

But how many and what type, and what wattage? Marcus at CBS has fitted a number of systems on both cruisers and narrowboats and so we decided that, as we knew and trusted him and his workmanship, we would give him the job.

Marcus washing our roof down after removing our ladder holders on the port side

This ladder will be fixed on the same side at the front and our boat hook will be held to the port of our back hatch, right where we need it.

Marcus feeds the wires through the roof and down through our stern electric cupboard

Along the roof to the panels

You will see we decided on four panels, each 80 Watts and sourced from (Ebay) T. J. Northern Star Ltd with a Blue Sky MPPT controller from Solar-Wind. John ordered them, together with the cabling and MC4 connectors. He also did several hours preliminary work feeding the cable from a roof access point through to the electric cupboard - it all helped to cut costs!

John and Marcus spent a while discussing final placement of the panels

The "after" photo

There are a couple of small jobs to be completed yet and we return to CBS on Wednesday for these. So now we hope for some sun to check the whole thing works - the short bit of light we had after they were fitted showed that they are charging at least! We proceeded upstream with a very different "look" along the roof.