this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Basically made a really sturdy pergola and then mounted solar panels to it. Ran that wiring to the MPPT, batteries and inverter in the garage. Put in a new small breaker box right next to the existing one, which made it real easy to just grab the wires for the critical loads and run them over to the new panel.
Aha, the separate breaker box is the part I wasn't thinking about. I'll need to do some thinking on how I could make that work for me. Thank you for the info.
Kent?
No but he sounds like a cool guy
He is, colleague of mine has a very similar setup lol
Lots of people do :)
I don't understand the parallel part. Do you mean independent, so the critical stuff can only get power from the solar circuit? Since it's critical stuff, do you have a fallback if solar production is low? Is your battery 24 or 48v?
You could plug the bluetti into wall power and while there is wall power it runs off that like a UPS.
That setup I believe would also use solar while it was producing, but the moment solar was gone it'd switch to the house power.
If the overall load is more than house power can give via an outlet (you could add a beefier outlet if the bluetti supports higher inputs) it'd start draining the battery.
I dont know if bluettis software says use solar / battery only until battery is 10% kinda thing so this might not be optimized to use solar properly.
Edit: just realized someone else was the one who mentioned bluetti, and not OP, but this is doable with other systems too.
I mean the 2 systems are not connected in any way. They're completely independent.
If it stays cloudy for a few days, or I am anticipating a potential outage, I can plug in a battery charger to the grid.
My batts are 48V EG4 units. But I would go the "DIY" route if I were to do it again, they are considerably less expensive.