Solar Panels and Generators

[Purdy Bear]

If you have solar panels do you need to get a seperate generator. I dont know anything much about either so please excuse my ignorance.

[DeneciePie]

Nope. Solar panels ARE generators. The only trick is to find a way to get the DC voltage coming from the panel into a form your household appliances can use. We have solar panels on our cruising sailboat and get nearly all our juice from them. BUT nearly all our gear is 12 volt DC.

There are some that come in a "plug and play" form so you wire them up and plug them into a household wall plug where they add their magic directly to your electrical system, but not all are that way.

What you may be thinking of is a solar regulator that converts the power from the panel into whatever form you need; either direct to usage or as a charging system for a battery bank for off-grid living.

Hope this helps.

[Annpan]

There are some that come in a "plug and play" form so you wire them up and plug them into a household wall plug where they add their magic directly to your electrical system, but not all are that way.

Wow!!! I don't think you get them in UK, you pretty much need to rig up a separate system as you say.

[Loobyloo]

We just bought a tansportable one from maplin, it folds into a briefcase style of thing and you just open it, hook it up to a battery (similar to a car battery) and it charges it. It comes with cables etc so you can then use the battery to charge mobile phones, laptops, rechargable batteries (AA, AAA etc) etc So we should always have a leccy source while we're travelling.

[snapdragon]

Nod Nod, lots of clever stuff in Maplins

[Wombat]

There are some that come in a "plug and play" form so you wire them up and plug them into a household wall plug where they add their magic directly to your electrical system, but not all are that way.

Umm, I may be wrong here but as far as I am aware, all solar panels produce DC, which is not compatable with the AC house circuit. An inverter is needed to convert 12 or 24 volts DC to 240 or 110 AC. In any case plugging directly into a house socket would be a bad idea. Apart from the obvious electrocution risk, there would be no benefit unless your house circuit was isolated from the reticulated power supply as there is no way to measure the power input you would just be charged for your normal power supply. The usual practice is to have a separate meter to measure the output of the inverter/panels or a single meter but one that is designed to go backwards as well as forwards to take off the input from the panel/inverter set up from the power bill.

Nev

[goo]

We bought an inverter about 10 years ago, simply to make more efficient use of our generator. They work by transforming the direct current stored in batteries into the alternating current required for most of our household electrical appliances, thus making the stored electricity useful. It also acts as a charger for us, charging a bank of 12 two volt batteries while the genny is running.

Ours was a Trace 24v inverter, but I'm not sure if Trace still exists, at least not under that name. It has been reliable and we've really had no trouble with it, except when we do something really stupid like try to start something requiring 8kw! But it's no worse than tripping a switch in a standard set up. Our next job is to use this set up to make the most of renewables.

This was not cheap to do at the time, believe me, I don't know if they've become cheaper over the years. And there are many different makes, models, sizes, outputs etc available.

[sunnybp]

If the Solar PV panel have enough power output, normally the system will not need any other generator. However in special times as long rainy days, the solar power system maybe can not support the load. So in strict demand system, hot standby system may need separate generator.Please review attach diagram for reference.