Solar system designer generator#
Solar system designer full#

Take the worst case scenario of sun-hours for your area by using the season with the least amount of sunshine during the period in which you’ll be using the system (i.e. When designing an off-grid solar system – especially one that will be counted on to provide your electricity day in and day out, be conservative.

And unless you live near the equator, you do not have the same number of hours of sunlight in the winter as you do in the summer.

Solar system designer full#

Obviously, the sun isn’t as bright at 8AM as it is at noon, so an hour of morning sun may be counted as half an hour, whereas the hour from noon to 1PM would be a full hour.

It is how many hours 1000 Watts worth of solar radiation strikes a square meter of surface area at the location over the course of a day. The number of sun-hours at a location is not the number of hours of daylight at the location. This available energy from the sun for a given location is referred to as that location’s “sun-hours.” After discovering how much energy you need to make per day from our load calculator, you’ll need to tell it how much sunshine you’ll have to harvest from. The second half of our off-grid calculator can help you figure out how many solar panels you’ll need for your solar system. Calculate the Number of Solar Panels Needed for your Location and Time of Year So how many batteries do you need for your off-grid solar system? Use our off-grid calculator to calculate what size battery bank you need based on your answers to the questions above.ģ. Most full-time off-grid homes are best off with a 48V system. Besides reducing how many parallel strings of batteries you’ll have, it’ll allow you to use thinner and less expensive copper cabling between the batteries and the inverter. But if you need to power much over 2000 Watts at a time, you’ll want to consider 24 volt and 48 volt systems. If you are planning a small system and simply want to be able to charge your cell phone and power 12V DC appliances in your RV, then a 12V battery bank makes sense. What voltage battery bank will you use – 12V, 24V, or 48V? Generally, the larger the system, the higher voltage battery bank this keeps the number of parallel strings to a minimum and reduces the amount of current between the battery bank and the inverter. The colder the room they live in, the less efficient they are and the bigger the battery bank you’ll need – over 50% bigger for below freezing! Each of these answers affects the size – and therefore the cost – of your battery bank. Will you be storing the batteries in an insulated room or will they be in a cold location?īatteries are rated for storage at around 77☏ (25☌).

Solar system designer generator#

Do you have another power source, like a generator or turbine, that can kick in in a pinch?.

Do you need only enough storage for a day or two, or do you need to have enough batteries to store three or four days (or more) worth of power? How frequently do you get multiple sunless or low-sun days in a row? Your batteries need to be able to get you by during periods when your solar panels are producing well below their maximum.

Think about the weather patterns in your area.

Now that you know how much power you need, you need to figure out how many batteries you need to store it. Calculate the Amount of Battery Storage You Need You’ve got to remember absolutely everything that will be powered by your system – remember, if you’re going off-grid, you won’t have grid power to fall back on! 2. You can’t just say “I’m going to buy two solar panels and a battery and hope it will be enough.” Use our kWh calculator to add up everything you’ll be powering with your solar power system. How much? Well, that depends on your distance and gas mileage. Planning a solar system without knowing how much power you need is like planning a car trip and not knowing how far you are going, and in what vehicle. This is the most important step, and many people try to skip over it. Making energy improvements first has a cascading effect on keeping the cost of an off-grid power system down. So it’s extremely worthwhile to consider improving your home’s energy efficiency before you design a power system for an inefficient home full of aging, power-hungry appliances and incandescent light bulbs. You will probably not be surprised to learn that designing a power system to run an off-grid home is not cheap. Are you interested in designing an off-grid solar system? Here are the 6 steps to get you started.