Ok Im trying to power my room using solar panels and I've figure out that I need about 700 watts to do so, but I really only use my electronics at night. I was wondering if I could buy lets say a 200 watt solar panel and let it charge a battery all day would that work? I live in southern california so I dont have to worry to much about cloudy days. also any suggestions on where to buy a panel, inverter, charge regulator, and battery?
You would probably need several batteries. 700 watts means about 40 Amps from a 2 volt battery. That is a lot of current. You need to loot at how may watt-hours you need. And how many amp-hours for the batteries.
Solar panels range fromwatt to 200 watts. Most panels up to30 watts are 2volts. Siemens puts out a module (SM0) that is rated at 0 watts, 2volt, and 6.3 amps.weight (without a frame) .5 kg ms 660mm by 36mm., .868 sq meters, 26.73 watts/m^2. Do a google search for solar panels. Southern Cal. should have lots of suppliers. I know there is one in Arizona.
You have to look carefully at your battery choice. If you use lead-acid, use only the sealed type. Then you need to select a battery charger that is tailored to that battery type. If you want to run 700 watts for 6 hours, that is 0kwhrs. A 200 watt panel will take 50 hours to charge that, probably more like 70 to allow for losses. Even is S CA you don't get 70 hours of sun per day. Even for 3 hours of nite use, that still needs 25 hours of sun. So you need much more than a 200 watt panel. Bottom line, you need to calculate your needs much more carefully. PS, 700 watts is very large. Check it. Are you using all that stuff at the same time?
What you really need to calculate is your energy requirements, you are only stating your power requirements. Power (W) = how many watts of power are you using? Time (h) = how long are you going to use the power for? Energy requirement(Wh) = W * h take the answer to that equation and plug it into the exact same equation except substitute how much sunlight you get for h and then solve for W to find what you need in the way of a solar panel. Wattage of solar panel (W) = Energy requirement (Wh)/hour of sunlight per day (h) Now you know what wattage of solar panel you need. For the battery you use a different equation: Energy in the Battery(Wh) = Battery Voltage (V) * Current Capacity (Ah) Solving for Current Capacity: Ah = Wh / V This will tell you how big a battery you need, but you also need to be concerned about how much current it can source. For this you need to know what your peak power requirement is. Wmax = peak power requirement Max discharge current (Amax) = Wmax / Vmax Also you will need an inverter rated to Wmax as well.
