I am looking to mount my solar panels on an uninsulated pole barn about 30m from my house.
Does it make more sense to route my 48V dc lines to my climate controlled house or should I build a climate controlled space for just my solar inverter/batteries in my barn?
Are there any off the shelf containers for battery storage? Like a chest freezer designed to keep the interior at 15c?
The system will be hybrid grid tied with about 7kwH of battery capacity. My house is very shaded, but the pole barn is not. That is why mounting panels on the house is not an option.
A modified chest freezer might actually work extremely well for a DIY solution.
Already extremely well insulated.
Keeping a small space like that conditioned to the right temperature will use much less energy than trying to condition an entire (and likely poorly insulated) shed.
Already has a built-in cooling circuit for when/if the batteries need cooling. You just need to modify or replace the thermostat so you can set it to the temperature range you want. Then you just run the freezer’s compressor whenever the batteries are too hot.
Just need to add in some resistive heating coils somewhere inside the freezer space (maybe a small space heater), with their own thermostat, giving you the ability to heat the space. (Maybe the defrosting circuit of the freezer can be used for this. Something to look into.) (If you wanted to be really efficient, maybe you could look into adding a reversing valve to the freezer’s refrigeration circuit, allowing it to operate as a heat pump for more efficient heating … but that’s starting to be a really involved modification.)
But … yeah. A chest freezer with some relatively minor modifications could actually be an ideal temperature-controlled battery box!