i would like to hook up a power outlet to a solar panelmy light system is 500watts will run for 8 hours/day between noon to 8PM.So what is the most effective system do I need?
You CANNOT directly hook up anything to your solar panel that is ac as your solar panel is dc. You need several things in order to make it work correctly. I have put up a small diagram of how basic solar works and have included a link below where you can see it. Then if you have further questions, I will be more than happy to answer them for you if I can. Thanks Rock
You will need at least 500 W of solar panels (probably more to cope with cloudy days), and a DC to AC inverter. Since you're going to 8pm you *may* want a battery bank system too for those shorter winter days.
How critical is the power, and is it only lighting? If it's only lighting what the other person suggested about a SunTunnel is the best solution. Not only is it less than /0 the cost, it will be 00x as efficient. If you think about it, it's kind of silly to turn the sun's light into electricity, throwing away 80%+ of the energy in the process, then turn that back into light again, throwing away 95% of that energy in the process. Much better to just use the light directly. Or cut some ordinary skylights or windows. If you are intent on solar electricity, it would be better to install a grid-tied system, and offset the electricity from your building in general, rather than try to build a dedicated outlet for the lights. Call a professional solar installer for a free quote.
The least expensive way would be to get a 500 W or preferably a higher rated UPS. The higher the rating, the more robust the inverter. You can get two year old ones cheap because most people don't realize that it's just a $2 battery that goes bad every two years. Get some Car batteries in parallel to build up more capacity. Deep cycle marine batteries or golf cart batteries are best. Connect the Solar Panel to the batteries via a FET diode, assuming your solar cells are wired to produce 2 V or better power (you probably would want at least 8 V), this is to charge the batteries when the sun is shining. A little bit of analog circuitry magic can create a current limiter based on a Darlington pair type layout. Connect the batteries to the rest of the UPS (don't plug it into the wall) and you can run 0 V 60 Hz AC devices off it's outlets. You may want to snip the wire going to the speaker so you won't hear the alarm. There's no way you could sync this to the grid so don't even try a grid tie in and the inverter in the UPS is only intended to run for 0 to 20 minutes so it may burn out however we've run UPS inverters constantly for months before when we needed a cheap power converter to change AC power frequencies before.
Most efficient manner would probably be to use solatubes, or sun tunnels during lighting hours, then replace the 500 watt lighting system (assuming it's incandescent) with LED's, that should give you about the same light output for around 00 watts or a little less even. Then you need a solar panel that can produce 00 watts for as long as you want (at a 00 watt lighting system) or 200 watts for /2 the time you want, etc, etc. Allow a good 0% or so for inverter inefficiencies, and 0% or so for reserve, so 20 watt's per 00 watts. After you have this, you will want a charging controller, a battery, or battery bank (These should at very least be deep-cycle, or better yet golf-cart batteries with series between 2, and parallel between banks of 2 for the 2-volt portion of the system), with enough amp-hours to support your system, plus a good 0% or so reserve, plus another 0% or so for inverter inefficiencies (remember the over sized solar panel above, this is why), than of course you also need a 2-volt DC to 20-volt AC, 60 Hz system (or 240 volt AC 50 Hz system, depending on your AC system) inverter.
