Solar at Burning Man

[JackFlorey]

This year I built a fairly large solar system at Burning Man to see what sort of power I could generate. System was:

3200 watts of solar (8 400W bifacial LG Neos panels) on a wooden frame
10kwhr (2 x 5kwhr) EG4 LFP batteries
3500 watt integrated inverter (Renogy 3500)

System was 48 volts and I used power monitors to monitor output. We had loads of about 200 watts of lights, 400 watts of fans, a cooler (about 100 watts) and I would run an A/C for about an hour to cool down the RV at night.

The inverter has an aux AC input that takes an input from a generator for backup. We never had to use it.

The inverter also has an integrated 145V 80A charge controller which made integration a lot easier.

The battery has an RS-485 interface that I could have hooked up to a PC but I didn't bother. It had 4 LED's that let me monitor charge levels and that was enough.

The first day we got 2800 watts out of the system which is 88% of maximum which suprised me. I figured I'd get 75%. By Saturday that was down to 2200 due to dust I think.

It worked pretty well. We never ran out of energy. We came close one night when the tent was in use all night, but we never hit zero. We had one shutdown during one of the really hot/dusty days because I sealed up the inverter enclosure to keep the dust down, so I need to work on that.

We had one other person with a 12V system but we could not interconnect them due to the voltage differences. Didn't seem to matter too much.

We always had a full charge by about 2pm. That makes me think that if we have 10kwhr by 2pm we have enough power to run an A/C during the day. Next year we are considering a communal yurt with A/C for day sleeping.

Lessons for next year:
-Build better enclosure with dust filters to reduce temperatures and dust
-Add a bidirectional converter so we can interconnect with 12V systems

Pictures below. I didn't take any of the batteries/inverter.