Saturday, 28 November. Today I wired up the solar panels to the controller and the batteries. I had three pairs of wires coming off the roof -each pair handled the output of four panels wired in series. This gave 12 amps max @ 80-90 volts. Yesterday I had run the wires through a conduit from the roof down through a closet and under the floor to the bodega. Each hot lead went to a circuit breaker and the output of all three breakers were paralleled and fed to the MMPT solar controller. The controller matches the solar output to the battery input, in our case 16 big batteries (L-16's) wired in series/parallel to give 48 nominal volts. Although the amperages coming in are not high, 80 volts DC can still bite as I found out when I accidentally bumped one of the input breakers with my hand while tightening the ground wire. Ouch! I got a similar jolt when I got my hand across the batteries @ 42 volts (I had yet to connect the final 6 volt battery to give 48). Nothing real dangerous, but it did get my attention and made me very careful as I hooked up the big 4-0 cables that carried serious amperage to the inverter. Forty-eight volts is enough to arc weld with! Anyway, no sparks, everything went together fine and when I threw the breaker to connect the solar controller, it sprang to life, correctly identified that it was connected to a 48 volt battery bank, checked the solar panels and ran them up and down their voltage range to find the maximum output, and began pumping out about 500 watts even though there was heavy overcast. I checked each set of 4 panels separately and they were all contributing equally - always a good sign. On a full sun day they should put out 2.4 kilowatts. Wow. That part all worked first go with no problems. Great. Now for the scarier test - the inverter. Somehow I still worry a lot more about AC than DC, maybe I'm just more used to dealing with DC. Anyway, I flipped the big breaker that connects the batteries to the inverter and it too sprang to life, showing 50.4 volts DC in and 118 volts AC out. So far, so good. Of course the real test will come when I fire up the main panel and find out if I correctly traced out all the circuits and corrected all the errors the "electrician" had made. Cautiously, I threw the breaker sending the AC up to the main panel in the house - No sparks! No smoke! Up in the house, I carefully flipped on each breaker one at a time, checking the outlets with my volt meter and turning on fans and lights. Everything worked! Finally, back in the bodega, I plugged in the water pump and one by one opened the valves on the cold and then the hot water manifolds. No leaks and every faucet, etc. worked as it should. I still have to connect the propane to the water heater to test that, but so far, so good. I have two more fans to mount tomorrow, one outside light, and two inside ones and the electrical will be complete. Deb continues to make every room sparkle as she cleans each area as I finish making messes. There is no question now that as soon as we get our appliances, we will be able to move in. Exciting!