I’m briefly back in California and my neighbor asked me to help upgrade the solar panels for his well pump. He had a hodge-podge of low-wattage panels ranging from quite old to vintage, which all together would get 200 watts going on a summer day. He’d picked up two extra 400W panels last year when I upgraded his main house array and wanted to swap those in.
I use Blender for the physical design of most of my builds. Unlike Revit, it doesn’t think it already knows what you’re trying to build and constrain you to certain categories and typologies of assets. You make any kind of shape you can imagine (and Blender can actually help you make shapes you can’t imagine, if that’s your jam), and then easily arrange those shapes in any way. Extremely useful for quickly sketching and ideating in 3d to come up with something that ought to work.
I don’t really like most of the off-the-shelf options for panel racks, so I make my own out of unistrut. Unistrut is just an erector set for grown-ups.
Building the rack with the hodge-podge pole-mounts in front.
