DIY Solar Panels – How much power and what can you really do with them, power usage explained

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Home Page > Home Improvement > DIY > DIY Solar Panels – How much power and what can you really do with them, power usage explained

DIY Solar Panels – How much power and what can you really do with them, power usage explained

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Posted: Nov 05, 2009 |Comments: 0
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You have heard all about using solar panels and making your own electricity – BUT – there are so many questions before you even make the decision to either buy an expensive off the shelf system, or build your own. You have heard that a commercial system can cost thousands of dollars – then you have read that you can build a solar panel for about 0 – so what’s going on here !
I wondered the same thing and spent countless hours on the web – so I hope this simple and short overview makes it a bit clearer.

Before you even consider going all out solar, or just supplement your needs – what will you use the power for. If you’re in suburbia, there’s more to consider, such as will you hook up the sytem to the grid or not and what appliances would you power. On the farm or on your block in the coutryside, it’s a bit easier. You may simply need lighting for the night, maybe run a pump or heaven forbid, the laptop. In any case, in an “off-grid” situation, you have many more options. But whatever the location, how much power, how many arrays and how long will your power last are the obvious questions.

So here is a quick guide :
Most DIY solar panels are based on a set of 36 (3 amp, 3x6inch cells). The size of a array like this is about 1 x 1.5 meters. With a single array like this you can expect to produce 18V at almost 60Watts in bright sunlight.

What does this mean?
Lets keep this simple and practical, here’s the potential for a similar small 60Watt system.
If you had a 60Watt panel and could get 7 hours of light a day(optomistic), 7 days a week = 2940Watt hours (or 196 amps) per week, all of this is being very optimistic.
More realistically, you might get 4 to 5 hours of good sunlight or 2100Watt hours (60Watts * 5 hours * 7 days), dont forget those cloudy or rainy days when power output is reduced but still happening.

What can you do with that power?
1 x 10 watt compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) for about 2100 hours (or)
10 x 10 watt CFL(s) = 21 hours, about 4 hours per night for 5 days (or)
1 x 50 watt Laptop = 42 hours, about 6 hours a day for 7 days (or)
1 x 75 watt TV = 28 hours, about 5 hours a day for 7 days
(Remember this assumes you are discharging your batteries, which you should not do)

Lets say you charge 2 x 6V, 225Amp/hour deep cycle batteries(in series) = 12Volts. That means you would have have a “bank” of 2700 watts of power in the batteries. Connect the batteries to a 300Watt inverter and away you go. You would probably never want to discharge them below 40% and you may later want to add more batteries, you now have a reasonable supply of power. If you had no power before, now you would have lights, run a pump and be able to use a laptop.

In reality to make sure you were pushing out enough power to charge your batteries it may be more feasible to build 2 arrays, making it a 120Watt system and extra batteries. So, now I think you can see the potential of what a small system can do. You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars to do this. While there are even small off the shelf systems, it’s pretty likely you can build a pretty solid DIY solar system quite inexpensively.

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Greg Murry –
About the Author:

Providing information to online users interested in living, lifestyle and marketing. Helping people find DIY and Eco-Friendly solutions to everyday living. Visit SolarDIYTips for information solar DIY solutions.

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Article Tags:
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