Seems like I could dig through and find answers, but maybe someone else can benefit from my dumb questions....

The world is crazy.

I'm reading about folks in Asheville NC who wish they had a lot of things right now after Hurricane Helene, but one thing they are wishing for echoes what prompted my "log home journey" in the first place: they want ice.

Which is a weird place to start for a log home journey, I know....

Back in April 2011, there was a supercell tornado outbreak here in the South - over 300 tornadoes tracked across the region in one day. I made some mistakes that day like, "let's go home and ride this one out - I'll go fill up the cars with gas in the morning." The power went out around 3 in the afternoon, and didn't come back on for about a week. School was cancelled, my job was cancelled. There was no news (similar to what I've heard from Asheville). There were opportunist burglaries (you cannot imagine how dark a city can be at night with no streetlights). Luckily, we had an ornery dog and fence that encircled the yard and our cars at night. Like everyone else, after about 3 days, we had cooked all the stuff in our freezer. We avoided gas lines (and fights). We avoided getting burglarized or murdered, too. But we mostly missed ice and refrigeration. That storm is what prompted us to make a plan to get out of the city. I finally took the LHBA class in 2014, bought some land outside the city, and you know the rest of the story.

A couple years ago, I was gifted some solar panels (24 actually): They are 200W / 7A / 28v evergreen solar panels a guy gave me for the price of shipping them here from Texas ($300). They are brand new, but have "slight defects" in the manufacturing process - I guess that means they are slightly less efficient than brand new ones.

I wanted to get the garage built with a roof at the correct angle for our area (I found out that is 29 degrees), but like I said, the world is crazy, so I think I should get going on at least part of this project and get my fridge hooked up to solar. I think I can just move the wiring off my main panel and onto a sub "solar panel somewhere still inside the house.

I planned my breaker box so I can put a transfer switch underneath it if I ever go "full solar". I assume I could legally switch the whole house over to solar if I want to - probably some laws I have to follow, but only in a "not grid down situation". But that's not my current project.

I just want to get the fridge hooked up.

It looks like I need 3 panels (so I'll do 4). I think a 24v system makes sense since my panels are rated for 28v. I'm guessing I should connect them in parallel to keep the voltage the same going into my charge controller. I assume I can use a PWM controller since I don't really care about efficiency at this point.

I'm still researching the charge controller and inverter, so chime in if you can point me in the right direction here.

For batteries... I guess I should keep it simple and do either sealed Lead Acid batteries, but should I do 2 @ 12v or 1 @ 24v? pros and cons? Or Lithium? And actually, I found the (what I'm going to call) Skip's Butt and Pass Battery: an Edison / NiFe battery. Edison invented these batteries back in 1901. The reason I'm calling them LHBA batteries is because they are stupid simple, you can make them out of off the shelf parts, they don't use any exotic materials (just steel / nickel / some kind of wafer insulator / and drano (potassium hydroxide). a cell of plates gives off 1.2 v (or microvolts?), so if you stack 10 plates together - that's 12v. They offgas hydrogen, but that's about the most dangerous thing about them - they are apparently unbreakable (you can't overdischarge them?), and renewable, and will last darn near forever - which is why nobody makes or sells them here in the USA. See why they are the LHBA of batteries? DIY. yeah. Anyway, I think I should start with "the usual" and test out the edison batteries on the side. Then if I get confident enough, swap them in in a few years...

Ok, I guess I need to get going with this project - should I mount it on the porch roof which is South-facing, and run wires to a little battery hut somewhere? Any good resources? I've already looked all over the internet - there's a ton of info, but haven't bumped into anything "comprehensive" -what do you got? books? websites?