Doktor Jones
Member
I have a friend who lives in a (somewhat permissive) apartment complex... he's looking at a DIY solar option to help cut his electricity bill. He's looking at starting out with a 1KW system to power some of his electronics that he has running. He doesn't intend to go entirely off-grid, but would like a solar array to power some of his electronics (and ideally charge some deep-cycle batteries) while the sun is out, then when the sun goes away the batteries continue to feed the system for a while. Finally, if his power requirements drain the batteries before the sun is available again, he would need the system to switch back onto the grid (without interrupting power to the devices).
Is building this sort of system plausible? If so, where would he get started, and what sort of components would he need? He was looking at a set of five 12V 200W cells... to minimize the necessary size of the transmission line, I was wondering if it'd be possible to run the cells (and therefore batteries) in series, for 60V @ ~17A max -- how feasible/practical would this be?
Attached is a diagram of what sort of setup he'd like to accomplish, in case my description wasn't terribly clear
Is building this sort of system plausible? If so, where would he get started, and what sort of components would he need? He was looking at a set of five 12V 200W cells... to minimize the necessary size of the transmission line, I was wondering if it'd be possible to run the cells (and therefore batteries) in series, for 60V @ ~17A max -- how feasible/practical would this be?
Attached is a diagram of what sort of setup he'd like to accomplish, in case my description wasn't terribly clear
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