Oh my hands hurt. I spent the entire day making or re-making cables for my off-grid solar system. I replaced 12 golf-cart batteries (I properly recycled them) with two big lithium batteries. You have to have very thick copper cables when rigging DC power and I sure as heck won’t buy anything I can make myself. Copper isn’t cheap, and buying the thick copper especially so. All the cables are custom shaped so they can snake around where they need to go. It isn’t flexy/bendy cable. Also all the cables should be identical make/thickness and identical length. The shorter the better, once your DC run is more than a couple of feet, it needs to be thicker and thicker. If you look at EV car fast DC chargers, the cables are 6-8 feet long and almost as thick as my wrist.
If you take salvaged old regular house romex which is (3) 14 gage wires, you can rope 4 romex together (12 wires) to form a 3 gage cable (about as thick as my thumb). I had to make about 8 cables today, almost like a weaving project but with damn stiff cord. Most of my prior cables were not the right length anymore since the batteries are in a different orientation and only have 4 posts instead of 24 from the old setup. I re-used what I could.
I also repositioned the the inverter which forced me to make new cables. Used a vice to crimp connectors on the ends, then I filled those ends with solder. I am really bad at soldering and make a real hash of the job. Luckily it isn’t real fine work.
Anyways, that was my little battle for Planet Earth today.
Will be back at it tomorrow. Soon will have it all connected and back live again.