Before I do any any serious system on my house, i want to run a trial to get experience with a smaller system to ensure I know what i am doing and so I can get comfortable with the different components and the wiring. I have been looking around at different smaller kits or equipment and I am not sure what the best approach is to learn. I could just buy a kit that has everything properly sized in it or I could just throw a bunch of components together to do it. Or maybe seeking to get a small system first to learn is unnecessary. I am not sure. I am open to all recommendations
As far as I can tell, for any system you need:
As far as wiring goes, lets say you have 12 panels rated at 12V and 100 watts. To have a 12V system, I would just wire them all up in series and get 1,200 watts of power at 12V right and to get a 24V system I would just wire up 6 panels in series with 2 parallel rows and it would give 600 watts of power. Both systems would be 100 amps. Am I understanding this properly?
To size the charge controller, I have to make sure that the controller has the appropriate amp rating. Taking the example from before, the charge controller would need to be 100 amps minimum right? In theory I could take a 475 watt panel at 54V and use it with a 20 amp charge controller (something about that doesn't seem right)?
With inverters, is the watt rating the output watts in AC? So a 3000 watt inverter at 24V would output 3000 watts AC but can only receive 24V DC?
With fuses, if the example system is all technically 100 amps, I would need 100 amp fuses between the different components to protect them right?
Do all solar panels have the same connector (MPPT correct?)
for system monitoring, i dont always see to many options and it seems like inverters do it too. That is confusing to me as well.
I am in the southeast US and we supposedly get an average of 4.5 full sun hours where i am. If I had a panel that was rated at 100 watts, would that mean I could expect an average of 4.5 hours of 100 watt power generation from the panel? This has never been clear to me. (that would mean that a 500 watt system could produce an average of 2.25 kwh a day)
As far as I can tell, for any system you need:
- Solar Panels
- Solar Charge controller - which connects to battery (and inverter?)
- Fuses/breakers to prevent any component from getting overloaded
- Battery
- Inverter
- wires to connect everything
- BMS if not on battery and some kind of system monitor to keep track of what is generated.
- Combiner box if you have a bunch of panel strings in parallel or something
As far as wiring goes, lets say you have 12 panels rated at 12V and 100 watts. To have a 12V system, I would just wire them all up in series and get 1,200 watts of power at 12V right and to get a 24V system I would just wire up 6 panels in series with 2 parallel rows and it would give 600 watts of power. Both systems would be 100 amps. Am I understanding this properly?
To size the charge controller, I have to make sure that the controller has the appropriate amp rating. Taking the example from before, the charge controller would need to be 100 amps minimum right? In theory I could take a 475 watt panel at 54V and use it with a 20 amp charge controller (something about that doesn't seem right)?
With inverters, is the watt rating the output watts in AC? So a 3000 watt inverter at 24V would output 3000 watts AC but can only receive 24V DC?
With fuses, if the example system is all technically 100 amps, I would need 100 amp fuses between the different components to protect them right?
Do all solar panels have the same connector (MPPT correct?)
for system monitoring, i dont always see to many options and it seems like inverters do it too. That is confusing to me as well.
I am in the southeast US and we supposedly get an average of 4.5 full sun hours where i am. If I had a panel that was rated at 100 watts, would that mean I could expect an average of 4.5 hours of 100 watt power generation from the panel? This has never been clear to me. (that would mean that a 500 watt system could produce an average of 2.25 kwh a day)