Day #8 come and gone!

Man, I’ve been busy trying to finish this upgrade…but the little details and finish work are killing me.

First thing I did was “load balance” the main breaker panel. Yeah, that means I did load testing on my baseboard heaters and kitchen counter outlets that handle the heavy hitters such as the microwave, Instapot, toast, and air fryer. Moved those 6 circuits around to draw equally off of L1 & L2 to evenly distribute the current draw between each inverter. That way I don’t overload either inverter with too much load.

Then came figuring out how to monitor my battery bank accurately. The inverters’ battery monitors are very unreliable/inaccurate. So I will be reintegrating my Victron BMV-712 battery monitor with shunt. But that made me one VE.Direct port short on the Color Control GX (central computer). But I figured that out and had to order an adapter cable to use one of the spare USB ports on the GX unit. That cable will be here on Monday.

While I wait on that cable I decided to start installing wire ducts (a.k.a. raceways). That will protect the wiring and make everything look much neater. But, while I was doing that I noticed that my array grouping was wrong. So I am redoing some wiring and group arrays #1 & #3 together and #2 will be stand-alone to get better charging from the two controllers. But it snowed this morning and it’s cold and windy this afternoon…so I will delay that work. But I did get some of the ductwork in.

And then of course as I was about to close up the inverter/genset transfer switch I realized I should have different circuit breakers doing the work inside the transfer switch. So I had to order two of those…they should be in shortly. The appropriate circuit breakers will be better overall…correct protection for the wiring.

And finally, I am looking into a top-of-the-line, best-in-class surge protector that is supposed to be about as close to the best EMP/CME protection as you can possibly get at this point in time. I am waiting on them to give me a price on an evaluation unit. I will keep you posted on how that goes.

Well, that is about it…this is what I am doing in my spare time.

At the start of Day #8 –

At the end of Day #8 –

Related Articles –

• Great Solar Upgrade – Day #1
• Great Solar Upgrade – Day #2
• Great Solar Upgrade – Day #3
• Great Solar Upgrade – Day #4
• Great Solar Upgrade – Day #5
• Great Solar Upgrade – Day #6

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