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Here is the making of the solar panel. I still need a pictures of the finished panel on the roof. You can see in the last picture that with just the florescent light and a small heat lamp the panel read over 17V with no load. On the roof I get over 2 amps on a sunny day and it keeps the two small batteries charged up.
The panel is roughly 33"x23" and is simply an MDF board with tile spacers, painted white and behind plexiglass. I uses some aluminum U-Channel to make the frame and some L-Channel aluminum to mount it on the roof.
Here is the "Power Center". It's not much, but it's a start. I have since added a 30A Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) and have two circuits connected. One to the chicken coop and goat house and one to the lights in the north end of the workshop. I have also updated to a 1000W inverter after letting the magic smoke out of my 400W inverter shown in these pics.
Now that I have the wind turbine up, I needed to update my meters. The top meter here is broke but will be replaced with the one from the solar panel. That one is a volt/amp meter that toggles with a button. The next two are voltage and amps from the wind turbine. As soon as I get enough wire to run from the turbine over to the control center, I'll put up this new box. All wires are soldered and shrink tubed and mounted to connectors so the wiring can be easily and neatly connected. The meters are powered by a 9V battery so only turned on with a switch. The switch here is temporary and will be replaced with a button under the 3rd meter on the front of the meter box.
We had a storm (although it never rained, just got wind for a bit) come through and the PMA was spinning very fast. As you can see it was more then the battery should have, so I connected it to the heating element seen here - it heated it up nicely.
Here is the Wind Turbine from start of build to mounting on the roof. Still need final wiring. Right now it is only setup with a temporary (small) battery and wiring all over the place. Special thanks to Scott for supplying the Schedule 40 15' pipe used as the tower.
Here it is all painted (John Deere Green - supposed to be Emerald Farm Green, but that's as close as Lowes could get).
Here it is on the roof. It's rougly 8' above the roof with 7' inside the workshop mounted to the truss.
And here is the initial wiring for the turbine - it's just laying on my work bench with the wires coming down the pipe and just hanging there. I need about 60' of 6 awg wire to run over to the power center...and a bigger battery. The fan is there because it was very hot this weekend! It is not connected to the turbine. The meters show 0 amps and battery voltage as there was no wind at picture time. During the brief storm that blew through it did hit 4 amps feeding the batteries which is already over their rating but a good first test!!
