What’s up? Youtube is LDS reliance. I wanted to do another video in the Solar basics series and this time I want to talk about cables. I feel, like cables is probably one of the least understood and most often overlooked parts of your solar panel system, and it has a big impact on the performance of your system.
There are many different types of wire out there to use and you’re, going to get a lot of different opinions, depending on who you ask, but we’ll go over some of the critical things to think about before you make Your decision, the main thing to consider when you’re picking your wire, is, we want to lower resistance.
Resistance is something that impedes the flow of the electrons through the wire and the more resistance you have, the lower the voltage will be at the end of the wire. So why is that important? Well, if you have too much resistance, your voltage will drop to a point where your inverter won’t, be able to work anymore or your charge.
Controller may not have enough power to charge up your batteries, so the general rule, then, is the bigger. The cable, the less resistance, generally speaking, you’re going to have so in this picture.
This is a battery cable, which is really thick but kind of inflexible and stiff. So this is great for connecting batteries together, but not for wiring your panel, all the way to your charge, controller or or whatever, like that.
The other thing that you can use to connect your batteries together is welding, cable, which is similarly thick, but it’s, much more flexible. It’s, made of a lot more strands of copper than the battery cable, similar resistance, but just a lot more flexible and that’s.
My personal opinion of what I like to use for battery connections for everything else. I my personal favorite is th H, n wire, which is a designation used for outdoor purposes, so the jacket material is resistant against UV for sunlight and it’s, weather resistant, so that’s.
What I recommend you use to connect your solar panels to your charge, controller, anything that’s, basically going to go outside. When you’re indoors, you can really use almost any kind of wire. You want again the thicker, the the better to a point, but the thicker cables are going to be more expensive because there’s, more copper in it.
In this picture, this is speaker wire which, which works just fine for 12 volt DC purposes or 24 volt or whatever you got, but make sure there’s. There’s, a couple different distinctions when you’re working with that kind of wire, the first one is.
You want to stay away from copper, clad aluminum, and this is wire, as you can see in the picture there, where it’s actually aluminum, but it’s coated on the outside, with copper. So aluminum is not as good a conductor, meaning it has higher resistance than copper, so stay away from CCA or copper, clad aluminum, why the other one to stay away from is solid wire you want to always use stranded wire solid wire is is fine as far As a resistance goes, but it’s harder to work with because it bends and it holds that bend it doesn’t it doesn’t, relax so stay away from this.
Unless you really want to use that for specific purpose and bend it around things and that and have it hold its shape, so you can use most any other type of cable. As long as it’s stranded and is a biggie gages you can afford, or that will physically connect into what you’re connecting to make.
You want to look for oxygen, free, copper, stay away from the copper, clad, aluminum and other than that, and then for easy purposes of working with it. You want the red and black and typically so, that you’ll, know which one is positive and which one is negative.
Alright, so there you have it now. You’re, an expert on cables and if you have any other questions anything I didn’t cover, as always be sure to come in my video or send me an email, and I’ll, be happy to do what I can thanks for watching
