Uploaded August 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
In this video I review the new racks I built in order to mount the 20 new solar panels I recently purchased. I built these racks out of wood because they will be temporary until we get a house/shop built and can built a permanent ground mount rack. Typically you would see solar racks built out of steel or aluminum and this type of setup would not pass an inspection for permits. Since these racks are portable they are considered personal property and do not require a permit...This means we can have power completely off the grid until we get everything setup more permanently.
One of the problems with solar trackers is there are many moving parts and you have a massive amount of stuff to move around. These 20 panels would all need to stay facing the same direction due to the fact that they are wired together on one charge controller.
If you look on the thumbnail photo there are 2 solar tracker racks on top of the shipping container. I just recently retired these trackers due to the fact that they have been a headache nightmare. With my parents being on the ranch and me living out of the state it makes it really difficult to have a system with all these moving parts that requires all this maintenance.
One feature I did not mention is that these racks can easily be lifted up with one person and tilted on their back so that the panels are facing 55 degrees east to better catch morning sun. Obviously this would require a person to take care of that but we now have so much generation capacity that the need for a tracker to increase efficiency is no longer desirable because the maintnence outweighs the increase in production.
In this video I review the new racks I built in order to mount the 20 new solar panels I recently purchased. I built these racks out of wood because they will be temporary until we get a house/shop built and can built a permanent ground mount rack. Typically you would see solar racks built out of steel or aluminum and this type of setup would not pass an inspection for permits. Since these racks are portable they are considered personal property and do not require a permit...This means we can have power completely off the grid until we get everything setup more permanently.
One of the problems with solar trackers is there are many moving parts and you have a massive amount of stuff to move around. These 20 panels would all need to stay facing the same direction due to the fact that they are wired together on one charge controller.
If you look on the thumbnail photo there are 2 solar tracker racks on top of the shipping container. I just recently retired these trackers due to the fact that they have been a headache nightmare. With my parents being on the ranch and me living out of the state it makes it really difficult to have a system with all these moving parts that requires all this maintenance.
One feature I did not mention is that these racks can easily be lifted up with one person and tilted on their back so that the panels are facing 55 degrees east to better catch morning sun. Obviously this would require a person to take care of that but we now have so much generation capacity that the need for a tracker to increase efficiency is no longer desirable because the maintnence outweighs the increase in production.
