Anybody know anything about solar power?
Anybody who has listened to me whine for the last 2 years knows that I am paying a huge amount in my electric bill. I saw a free-standing solar power unit yesterday, the size of a cereal box. I'm not sure what it is powering, but it made me wonder --
Can I get just a handful of those and run them straight to my central heat and air unit? I live in south Georgia on the coast, and we have strong, direct sunlight almost every day. That would be ideal for powering my AC unit, but I don't want to pay a fortune for the panels in my roof. I was told it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to do the panels in the roof.
What about just smaller ones though? Not to power the whole house, but just the AC unit?
Oh well...
So I'm guessing you want a small one that's like, less than, say, 20 pounds. One that you can grab and move to wherever you want. Sure, you can get that. It would be lovely because you'd be able to maximize your gains if you babysit it. Georgia gets about 4.5h of sunlight per day as an average per year. So that's how you should make back of the envelope calculations.
What you need to understand is that to get a small one is going to be... bad for you if you don't make a proper easy-to-handle setup. To feed your air conditioner, which currently feeds itself from the house grid, to make that solar panel work for you you'll have to connect it to your home grid. Which is a hassle. Now if it's small and you wanna move it around, you're kinda limited because it has a cable that is attached to it that goes into your house. Moreover, the cable in fact, is not directly tied to your solar panel. It's tied to something called an inverter. For small solar panels, you can buy something called a "micro-inverter". So the connection is like this:
House - inverter - solar panel. Why do you need an inverter and what does it do?
The energy we use is alternative current. Solar panels produce direct current. The inverter makes that transformation. However, expect to lose anywhere between 10-20% of energy at that transformation. So if you were to get 100W per h, you would really just get 80-90W per hour. Now ofc, you won't get this much because small ones don't give you this much.
Now when you will shop for a solar panel you need to look at watts. As in, how many watts does a solar panel produce per hour. It's important to get the per hour watts production because otherwise you won't be able to make proper calculations. What to look for? Watts. If a solar panel tells you that it produces 80 watts or 55 watts, that is per hour. A good solar panel will produce around 100 watts per hour. So that means with 4.5h a day that Georgia gets, you can at best hope for 450 watts per day. Ofc, in the summer, you're gonna get more. Now a typical house in the western world consumes anywhere between 600-800watts per hour. Which means that your entire daily intake of energy from a solar panel that produces 100 watts will get you less than 1h worth of consumption. Add to that the 10% or 20% loss, and you get even less.
Ok. Let's look at it another way and this will make it clear for you.
An air conditioner unit will eat about 50-60 watts an hour.
So therefore, you need to get a solar panel that does 50-60watts and hour +20%. =>
=> You need a solar panel who tells you it does at least 72 watts.
So therefore, you need 1 solar panel that produces 75 watts per hour to account for the same hour you use an air conditioner.
An average 75 watts solar panel will cost you over 150$. An inverter... probably 100-200$.
Hope this helped. I had to do a bit of research that's why it took me so long.
And again, don't forget about the hassle if you plan on moving the small solar panel (should not be heavier than 20 pounds, a solar panel that make that much power) because it always has to be connected to the inverter.
I could afford it on the lower end, but couldn't afford $10,000 for just enough to juice my AC.