It has been great having our camp out at Firehill Lake, especially since it is only about a 10 minute drive from our house to the camp. While there are poles in place and telephone service available there is no hydro power. The poles installed were designed to manage hydro as well but issues cropped up such that no power has been yet been brought in.
I did spend about a year trying to get that off the ground again, including doing a survey of the existing pole line. But Hydro One, the public utility responsible for construction and maintenance of the public electric distribution system, have proven to be anything but helpful. For example they were insisting that all the cottage owners at the lake put up 25 years estimated maintenance costs ahead before they would proceed. This doubled their estimated cost of installing the power line with the estimate being guaranteed to be +/- 50% of the actual cost. This therefore made this totally fiscally unreasonable.
As I wanted to do some of my consulting work while out at camp I decided to spring for a small solar electric system. Nothing too elaborate with just 3-190 watt solar panels, an inverter, a 300 watt true sine wave inverter, 4-6 volt deep cycle batteries and an auto-transfer switch if and when I wanted to run off the generator.
After doing a careful site study I decided the best thing to do was to make an external battery box and box to host the electronics as I don’t have enough room in the camp and the small shed hosting the generator is too far from the solar panels. Both to be placed on the outside of the camp.
Prior to installing everything I built the two boxes, primarily out of 1/2” pressure treated plywood that I had on hand. The battery box I built just large enough for the four batteries plus 2” thick foam insulation as I will be leaving everything there during the winter time too. The electronics enclosure is large enough so that none of the components inside is cramped and with a sloped roof to shed rain.
The first thing I installed was the battery box. I have it on frame made of pressure treated 2x4’s strong enough to support the weight. The batteries fit inside just like a glove when the insulation is in place!
Next came the wall mounted box with all of the electronic components: Blue Sky Energy Solar Boost 50 charge controller, Morningstar Sure-Sine 300 watt pure sine wave inverter (as will be powering electronics I wanted good clean AC power), circuit breakers for the charge controller, the grounding plate and a 30 amp auto-transfer switch (when the generator is fired up the charge controller and the rest of the solar related components will be isolated from the camp to prevent any electrical damage.
Once in place it was time for the wiring. While not complicated, my supplier gave me very good sketches and made sure all connections were colour coded so that there would be no mistakes.
Once I was happy with all of the connections I then installed above the electronics box high up on the wall, just under the cabin eave, a combiner box whereby I tied in the feeds from the panels to a single output lead to the charge controller.
Next came the installation of the panels. These I just fastened using the provided clips to the roof right up by the peak. Fortunately the roof slope angle is very close to the 20° that my provider recommended as being the most optimal all-season angle for our latitude.
Then I ran all of the leads to the combiner box. Now this is where I ran into one minor snag; my supplier had pre-attached all of the wire needed to each of the components with extra to allow for margin of error, except for two of the panels! Each was about a foot and a half short! So I spliced in some heavy gauge wire that I had on hand and made the final connection.
The last step before powering it on by flipping the breakers was the installation of a simple on/off switch inside the camp so I could turn the inverter on or off as needed as it will draw a little bit of power even if in stand by mode. So at night, when nothing is running, there is no sense wasting battery power on an inverter that isn’t being used!
The moment of truth went flawlessly! I turned on the breakers below the charge controller, then went inside and turned on the switch for the inverter. I checked out my cell booster that I had installed last year (as we are on top of a large hill the cell signal here is rather poor) and it fired up nicely!
Since then I have been out to camp several times with my computer and it is a great feeling to be working away surrounded by peace and quiet and able to overlook the lake when ever I want! Perfect!
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