Series & Parallel Wiring

electricity from the sun by John Drake II | home

Series wiring is where you connect batteries or solar panels

negative to positive and so on such as this:

This adds up the voltage but keeps the amp hour capacity the same, like

you would find in a flashlight.

Here is another example of a series battery setup:

And here is the wiring layout for our 48 volt system.

The above drawing represents one of the battery banks we have here.

It is composed of eight Trojan T-105 batteries ( 6 volt / 225 amp hour)

wired for a 48 volt system.

The amp hour capacity is 225 amp hours at 48 volts or 10,800 watt hours

total.

Parallel wiring is where you connect the batteries or solar panels with

all of the positives connected together and all of the negatives connected

together.

This keeps the voltage the same but increases the amp hour capacity.

And then we have a series/parallel setup.

This increases both the system voltage and the amp hour capacity.

The above drawing represents one of the battery banks we have here.

It is composed of eight Trojan T-105 batteries ( 6 volt / 225 amp hour)

wired in series/parallel for a 12 volt system.

The amp hour capacity is 900 amp hours at 12 volts or 10,800 watt hours

total.

As a note: The above 12 volt battery bank has the same type and number of batteries as our 48 volt system.

It stores the same amount of energy but delivers it in a different manner (voltage and amperage).