I'll be honest, when I first set up my panel, I really didn't have any concrete plans in mind to maximize production. I was much more focusing on just finding a stable spot, where neither the dogs of my home, nor the weather could cause it to tumble over and cause harm.

In a sense this was both a great idea and a fairly shoddy one.

Great, because I happened to somehow intutiively pick the exact angles needed to maximize my watts. As I've later learned, in Hungary a panel with a slope of about 30-40°, facing South is considered more or less the optimal setup, as it ensures the greatest amount of sunny hours in a day with the greatest amount of irradiance.

However, the location was still far from perfect, because, by placing the panel right next to my house, its shade inadvertently caused the panel to stop producing early in the afternoon, even though there were still plenty of perfectly usable hours of sunlight left in the day.

Since the angle was fine, I began to mess with the panel's position instead. This, however, ended up being a complete fool's errand, for one simple reason: I was severely constrained by the fact that the cable had to go through my window and that's only possible using the tiny strip of "super-flat" connector, that is able to fit the tiny gap between my window and its frame. Meaning even though I had about 2.5 metres worth of cable dangling uselessly between my battery and the connector, I couldn't use any of it. Instead, I had to work with only the ~0.5 metres worth of cable sticking out of the solar panel itself.

As you may have guessed, half a metre was practically useless. I could barely move the panel anywhere and even then the shading issue still remained as before. Something had to be done and the solution was obvious: I needed more cables.

Thankfully, this was a fairly simple problem to solve. I found a place that sold five metres for about 14€, which was a fairly decent price considering most other places sell shorter cables for easily double the price or more. Perhaps this was the seller's loss leader or they are just more honest about the real price of a cable like this. Either way, a few days later I was finally able to move the panel to just about wherever I wanted (assuming that 'wherever' was in a five metre radius from my window).

My first attempt was to put the panel in a South-West orientation. This produced better results than the original South-at-the-window setup, but only because it was further away from the house and thus didn't experience nearly as much shading. I was, however, still not satisfied because while the total was somewhat higher, the average wattage actually went down!

At this point I finally realized surely I'm not the first person who was curious how they should place their panels, so with a quick flick of Google, I managed to figure out that South is the way to go. I quickly built a small stack of bricks to provide support for the right angle and aligned the panel against it.

Here are some example measurements I've made. Some of these were very sunny days with nary a cloud, others temporarily downcast and even rainy.¹ As you can see, as long as there is decent sunlight, the system can bear the load with zero issues.

Table 1: Battery charge level (%)

Date/Hour	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21
May 4.	10	26	41	63	81	94	95	92	92	87	78	57	46	36	18
May 11.	15	19	26	22	26	34	47	48	47	39	29	18	8	8	8
May 12.	8	9	12	19	28	39	54	73	83	78	69	58	50	47	31
May 13.	15	20	30	48	66	77	92	99	99	95	85	84	62	47	38

Table 2: Input in watts

Date/Hour	Weather	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
May 4.	Sunny	131	291	319	319	315	294	231	114	84	15	12	13	6	0
May 11.	Rainy	16	106	23	13	192	212	115	66	146	71	37	50	16	0
May 12.	Rainy	13	20	41	93	78	420	354	356	131	69	57	34	6	0
May 13.	Sunny	21	90	213	279	325	305	341	133	113	78	13	13	6	0

However, I was phrasing the earlier paragraph very carefully and I've done so for a reason: While the battery could easily withstand a couple hours of little/no input, my single-panel workflow was severely disrupted on days where there wasn't much sunlight. This is a fairly obvious observation, I realize, but it kind of has to be said.

On days like this, I was forced to plug my battery into mains, which does meant I was using as much (or even more due to the inefficiencies of conversion) electricity as I did before investing into this system.

Still, not all is doom and gloom, because…

Yup, I could not resist the siren-call and decided to purchase a second solar panel. My reasoning was the following: While the single-panel setup was reasonably good for my own PC, not only did it struggle with days of less sunlight, but it also meant my partner's PC could not really run from the battery because our combined drain was simply too much.

So I decided to cash out and buy the AE METEOR 510W, which as the name implies is a 510W panel, bumping my total theoretical production up to nearly 900W. With a large asterisk, of course.

Solar panels affect each other, whether they are wired in parallel or series. In my case, since I went with parallel, it meant the individual panels' current added up, but their voltage stayed at the same level. This meant the two panels provide around 34 volts and 27 amperes, which is then clamped to 12.5A by the battery's charge controller (with the 34V remaining unchanged).

The end result is still around 420-450W, however, not only am I able to achieve this level of charging around 8-9AM (which is easily 100-200W higher than with a single panel), the panels can also sustain this far longer (around 6-7 PM).

We've been "stress testing" the system by playing Path of Exile 2 with both of our PCs running from the battery and I was very satisfied to see that it can easily handle the load for up to 3-4 hours. Afterwards I had to plug in the battery into mains because it was starting to reach dangerously low levels, but as a whole I consider this a massive success.

My electricity bill dropped to nearly half as it used to be. In raw numbers this means going from around 210-250 kWh to around 100-120. In terms of cash, this is more or less going from 25€ a month to about 10€. Obviously 15€ won't save the world, but with how little effort it took, it's still quite a motivating number.²

Now, obviously I don't have an itemized list of which appliance used how much power in my home, so I cannot claim this drop is 100% only due to my solar setup, but the fact that there is such a marked drop before and after its installation means it has to at the very least contribute in a major way.

Either way, I'm very happy with the results and I'm excited to see what next month's bill shows.

I think it would've been wise to get two panels from the get-go. While the 410W panel I started with was great and could sometimes outperform the panel's expected output by 10-20W (on cold, but very sunny days I've seen it jump up to 435W), it wasn't quite enough provide enough power for 2 PCs all day long and even with the single one I always had to balance between having enough power vs having to turn my computer off earlier than I wanted.

I also wish I purchased a circuit breaker earlier. Two weeks of having to duck under my table every morning and night to pull out or plug in the solar cable to avoid the annoying clicking of the battery's relay constantly switching between on and off as the sensors picked up some minuscule current was really quite annoying in hindsight. Of course, if I was even lazier, I could just get a WiFi circuit breaker and automate the whole thing, but that really just feels like throwing a lot of money to "fix" a very small nuisance.

Finally, I should have researched the right orientation and placement first. Thankfully, I still managed to largely get by with the less than ideal conditions of my original setup, but it took such little time and effort to fix things.

In the future it could be perhaps worth paying a handyman to install the panel on the roof, which would also bring with itself the opportunity to get a second one, but with zero such connections and all the solar companies I've seen so far being very mum about their prices, I'm not rushing to take this path.

Until then, I continue to feel the same amount of enthusiasm and positivity regarding solar as I did in my previous post. It was a project I really enjoyed doing, I learned a lot during it (and since) and I'm excited to see just how little my next bill will be.

In the meantime here is my final bill of materials:

Item	Price (HUF)	Price (EUR)3
Anker SOLIX C1000	240000	615
410W Solar Panel	24999	64
MC4-XT60i adaptor	9489	24
MC4 "Super-Flat" cord	8080	21
Extension cord	4681	12
AE METEOR 510W	41800	107
Sum	329049	843

Thank you for reading!