A solar panel, a controller? Can I feed it into my regular house power supply or do I need to hook it to its own outlet(s)?
Cost?
Expertise needed? Is this something I could do without any special skills?
20 Watts is just too little power to do much. Using it to trickle-charge a pair of deep-cycle batteries, then using them with an inverter to run a laptop or one lamp after dark is an idea.
To sell back to the grid, you need more than 1000 watts to get anywhere. Sunny-boy is a brand of inverter that has been used with bp solar products.
Conversion of all heating loads (water heater, dryer, furnace) to gas would be a step in the right direction. With enough solar panels, a good inverter and batteries, you can run modest lighting and intermittent loads without drawing much from the grid
In my rural area, storms sack the power every month or more in the summer. The average outage is 2+hours. I use one deep cycle battery with an 800 W (continuous) inverter. It allows operation of my laptop, home-theatre and a single lamp until power comes back. A 20 W panel would be great to re-charge the battery (I swap it with the one in my truck).
4 responses to What do I need to supplement the power in my house with 20 Watts of solar?
solar panels as well as wind mills feed electro power to transformers which stores the power like a battery, a transfer switch is installed to separate land power from the generating source, most power co, will rebate what you generate after a certain amount, varies from state to state, but a good investment! several good articles in Popular mechanics look it up in their archives, good luck
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Electrical, maintenance engineer
20 Watts is just too little power to do much. Using it to trickle-charge a pair of deep-cycle batteries, then using them with an inverter to run a laptop or one lamp after dark is an idea.
To sell back to the grid, you need more than 1000 watts to get anywhere. Sunny-boy is a brand of inverter that has been used with bp solar products.
Conversion of all heating loads (water heater, dryer, furnace) to gas would be a step in the right direction. With enough solar panels, a good inverter and batteries, you can run modest lighting and intermittent loads without drawing much from the grid
In my rural area, storms sack the power every month or more in the summer. The average outage is 2+hours. I use one deep cycle battery with an 800 W (continuous) inverter. It allows operation of my laptop, home-theatre and a single lamp until power comes back. A 20 W panel would be great to re-charge the battery (I swap it with the one in my truck).
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Not worth the expense, to the engineer transformers DO NOT store power they change power i.e. 480 to 110, no wonder we in the field ignore you engineers.
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Electrician 33 years
20Watts of power wont even turn a light bulb on. as of right now solar energy has a pay off of about 10 years. Not good.
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