Does anyone know how solar works in plain English. .I bought 5 - 500 watt outdoor lamps for my yard that i would like to run off of solar power but im not finding an answer on how many or what type of solar panels to get or how many batteries and what kind. Anyone here know? Im not looking to spend a huge fortune to set this up any help is very apprciated.thanks,tony
With photo-electric when you have all the chemistry right a photon of the right energy (color) can knock electrons out of its orbit where it wanders down a conductor as electricity.
You need to allow for the sun not to be shining all the time, so have enough battery backup to allow for this, depending on how much you will use the lamps. What voltage are the outdoor lamps? The best solution is to use car batteries and 12v bulbs, as these do not need an inverter (which do wear out). You can buy 12v CFL's quite easily. Then it's a matter of working out the load (wattage) of what you intend to run off the panels and buying about half as much again, to allow for the lack of sunlight, cloud cover etc.You'll also need a charge controller.
Yeah, you pay lots of money to have it installed, it produces power when the Sun shines and had you just put the money in a good bank account instead, you could've bought the equivalent power from the bank account with it's interest and still have money leftover. Without government incentives like they have in Europe, it still doesn't make sense for the individual homeowner. Also the current method of grid tied inverters which use the grid as a 100% efficient battery thereby cutting costs to a third of a battery based system, depends on most of the grid subscribers not using solar. Should solar become popular, the grid tied concept would unravel the grid unless a way of economically storing energy could be found or an inexpensive load following generation source such as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors be deployed.
