I'm trying to figure out the best design to run my farm off solar or a solar/wind hybrid. I have three main buildings plus a garage. The main buildings are the house, a barn and what is now being used as our country market where we sell our goods etc plus start all of our plants. Right now we have one power source from the grid that goes from the road to the house. From there, it splits and a line runs to the yard light which splits again going to the garage, the store, and the barn. Typically people put the solar on the house, but the roof pitch faces east and west, plus the south side of the house has a large oak tree. Anywhere where a ground-mounted array is possible would be more than 200 feet away. The barn which is about 100 feet from the house has great southern exposure. The store which is about 75 feet also has great southern exposure. Both have a lot of real estate to put a lot of solar panels on. To begin, we could afford to put some solar on one of the two buildings, then add on as we are able to afford to.
Since I am not concerned with being grid-tied at this point, could I set up an array and battery bank on either/both the store and barn and use the existing electrical infrastructure to power all buildings at least to the extent of the solar power output? Would it be possible to have an array on both buildings, but one battery bank that is charged by both arrays or would it make more sense to have two? BTW, from the southern exposure on the barn to the southern exposure of the store is probably about 75 feet, however, a battery bank could be set up on the north side of the barn which would cut the distance from the store array to the battery bank to about 40 feet which puts the distance from the panels on the barn to the bank at about 35 feet.
