Battery Required for Solor System

If you're going to be running the ENTIRE solar system in your house, I'm afraid you're going to need one hell of a big battery!!!

Also, your house must be very large indeed! I live on the 3rd planet from the sun, and considering I'll be in your home, could you please stock up on Hot Pockets and Eggo Toaster Waffles.

This needs a thorough calculation considering the solar irradiation in your area. Also what is the back up capacity you want?

The solar system vendors provide this calculation. please go to them.

1000W isn't that much. There are irradiation charts that give the irradiance/m^2 or irradiance/ft^2. Generally, this can be seen in W/m^2 and sun hours. Most places will get 4 to 5 sun hours in a day. You can basically multiple the sun-hours by the panel power for your area and determine your general input power for the day (this is usually a best case scenario).



So if you live in a 3.5 sun-hour area, you would produce 3500W in a day (best case). When it comes to batteries, you'll want to get batteries to at least hold this much power for an hour. So getting batteries that add to 3500W-hrs would be best. So if you have 12V batteries with 10A-hr capacity, you would need 30 batteries to save this power for night usage. You may be able to go with less if you know you won't use that much at night.

Anyways hope this is helpful. Enjoy. I plan on doing the same thing with my home eventually. I'll be building probably 8 500W panels. (These panels are big but not that big). If you need more help check out my blog. I'll try to post something on solar energy soon.

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Justin Coulston
justin.coulston@gmail.com
TheModernEngineer.blogspot.com

1000W is very small for a household use determination. That is the equivalent of 1 small toaster. Are you sure you did not mean 10,000W, or 10kW? That would be a more reasonable power consumption for a small household.

So to determine the size of battery you need, you have to not only determine the amount of solar generation you can expect in your part of the world, but also the surface area you can afford to cover with solar cells and the length of time you will need to use electricity during the shortest day of the year. Then take that information to a repuable dealer in solar systems and they will help you. This is not something that can be effectively done by looking at internet chat rooms.