I’m in the process of converting my garage to my home office and want to set up solar to run my laptop, a couple monitors, lights, phone charging and I’m sure a few other small things.
I’m looking at this power station EcoFlow DELTA Portable Power Station 1300 and getting 4 of these panels Topsolar Flexible Solar Panel 100W 24V/12V to run parallel.
It seems like this setup would work, but I’m just curious what people who know more think about this setup and if there’s a better way.
I do like the portable power station so if the power goes out I can bring it in the main house as well as being able to plug it into an outlet for those cloudy days and I like the flexible lightweight panels as I’ll be installing these myself.
Those 4 panels in parallel would produce up to 21 amps. The maximum amperage that power station can accept is 10:
At best, the internal charge controller will limit the amperage successfully, and you will throw away half of your power. At worst, you fry your whole power station. You definitely don’t want either, so don’t run the panels in parallel.
Even running them as 2 strings of 2 would very slightly exceed the amperage limit. Most solar resources recommend a 25-30% current capacity overhead when selecting a charge controller to account for odd solar conditions, but you should probably be ok with that panel configuration.
If you run them all in series that could exceed the voltage limit of the power station when you get full sun. (4 x 18.7 V is about 75 V.) So your best bet is 2x2.