Once we figure out what length of cable is going to work for the batteries-they ALL have to be the same length, which makes it hard to make them look nice, which drives me crazy-then we cut all the cables, strip then, crimp them, and put on adhesive lined heat shrink.
It makes for a long, tedious day with this many batteries.
Plus, the batteries get loaded into the racks, flexible conduits built, and knockouts made in the appropriate spots.
Here’s Denise assembling the battery buss bars onto the batteries loaded up in a rack.
The beginning of starting to manage a lot of 2/0 and 4/0 cables.
And here’s an ugly truth-“green” energy makes a lot of trash. We’ve filled the back of our Polaris I don’t know how many times and made at least 10 yards of trash.
And then, here’s a story within a story:
A long time friend of mine, Kevin Holmgreen, is our outside sales rep for one of our electrical parts suppliers. He tells me he’s out fishing with a friend of his on Sunday and they get to talking about what they have to do for work the coming week. Kevin mentions he has to go deliver parts to this out of the way camp in the mountains, and his fishing buddy says hey! I’ve been reading a story about some guy named Chicken working up in that area! LOL. Small world. Never did catch Kevin’s friends name-but hello whoever you are here!
Here’s Kevin delivering-
Back awhile ago, I mentioned we had a couple secret weapons for making these inverter installs easier, and I showed you our custom template.
Well, here is our other secret weapon-the Milwaukee electric/hydraulic knockout tool.
It’s hands down the best and by far the fastest knockout tool I’ve ever used.
Here’s Denise effortlessly making some 3” conduit holes in just a few seconds.
Anyway, it was an entire day of assembling batteries, cables, and conduits.
Here’s what the batteries looked like all installed but not yet wired up to the buss bars.
We put color coding on every trio of batteries and their respective cables so that we can keep track of them and troubleshoot faster if needed.
One of the next steps will to be to turn each of the 30 batteries on and off one at a time and record their voltage, which will be written on that blue painters tape. This allows us to make sure all the batteries are within.5 volt before inter connecting them to prevent excessive current surges upon start up.
And finally, here’s what we had at the end of the day.
