Building your very own solar power system — how to help yourself and help the country too

By Lucy Hancock

We’ve all lived through the blackouts. I don’t need to remind anyone.

Last September I was late to the party. By the time I got to MegaKywi Wayra Plaza the rechargeable bulbs were gone, the power banks were gone, the shelves looked like locusts had been through. That’s when I decided to just make my own electricity instead.

What I ended up with is laughably small, but it works every single day:

110 W flexible Dokio solar panel

• One 110 W flexible Dokio solar panel on the balcony (ordered from Amazon)
• One 55 Ah deep-cycle AGM battery from MegaKywi (the kind with the normal car-type posts)
• One little 700 W Renogy pure-sine inverter that lives inside the apartment
• A cheap 10 A MPPT charge controller. Dokio included a PWM charge controller but the connectors to it don’t work. You have to buy an adapter, so instead of that, why not get a more efficient charge controller?

Of course, I did everything wrong at least twice. The absolute worst was discovering that car-style battery posts don’t accept the ring terminals that come on inverters. I tried alligator clips, tape, different rings, thought about it continually … nothing worked until a $6 metal Singaro multi-port connector (also Amazon) turned the battery into a proper little power hub. I bought several, which was just being emotional because I only have one battery.

Second worst was connections to and from the charge controller. This was just a couple of extension cables that fit. It was drama because I didn’t think of it in advance.

Tedious, was finding out I had the polarity reversed on the output from the solar panel. Multimeter, polarity-reverse adapter, and the inline fuse I blew and had to replace.

But it’s done now.

The inner workings

These radiant December days the panel keeps the battery continually topped up. I use it for Starlink a few hours a day just to give it a job to do. If ever needed, it actually has 520 Wh usable (it’s deep cycle and can recover from that) but it has 300Wh that it can use without fuss..

That’s enough for Starlink, all the LED lights from dusk till bedtime, phone charging, and laptop.

I became avaricious and I now have a second identical panel folded in the closet “just in case.” And I am embarrassed to also tell you about the wire strippers, crimping kit, pliers, ring terminals, and so on…. “I will never be hungry again!” she pulls out a drawer of weird hardware and shakes a fist at the sky.

And it works.

With Coca Coda erosion advancing along, I like to think I am helping the country.
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A native of Washington D.C., Lucy Hancock earned an undergraduate degree in astronomy from Harvard and a doctorate in physics and astronomy from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She worked as a consultant for the World Bank on projects involving the purchase of equipment to measure the weather. She lives in Cuenca where she keeps an eye on the night sky.