A Simple Guide to Solar Power - Second Edition

A Simple Guide to

Solar Power

Second Edition

By

Edward D Olsen

Copyright © 2015 Edward D Olsen

All Right Reserved

ISBN  978-1-329-69256-5

A basic look at solar power, for the person who doesn’t know very much about it but is wondering if it’s something they ought to look into.

Forward......

I am an electrical engineer and over the past few years I have experimented a lot with various kinds of solar power systems. During that time I have watched the solar-electric industry change, mostly for the better.

For me, this all started several years ago when I was trying find a simple way to get some electrical power out to my detached garage. There were no wires running over there and I thought it would sure be nice if I could just go out there in the evening, turn on some lights and maybe run some small power tools.

I bought a deep cycle battery, a 100 watt solar panel and a small 120 volt stand alone inverter.  My plan was to use that solar panel to charge the battery all day. That way I could have some power when I needed it, running off the battery and invertor.  It wasn’t very much power.  I couldn’t run a large table saw or anything like that but it worked pretty well for a while until the battery wore out, which didn’t take long because I failed to use a charge controller to protect the battery from over charging. The solar panel simply overcharged the battery over a period of time and it soon failed.

Well I tried to do a little better than that after the battery failed and soon this turned into a hobby. When I first started investing in this little hobby, solar panels were expensive.  Equipment was scarce and costly when you could find it. I recall paying about $600 for the single, 100 watt solar panel.  I believe the 1200 watt inverter was about $400 or so and the battery, it was about $100.

Since then this little hobby of mine got way out of hand and has evolved from being just a hobby sort of thing into a sophisticated and cost effective way to significantly cut down my power bill without laying out a fortune to get there either.  I have built up a rather complex system over the years that works quite well for me.  It didn’t really cost me as much money as you might expect. It is true I have a significant advantage because of my engineering background.  But with the basic equipment that is commonly available now, most anyone with some limited techy skills can do what I did quite economically. If I tried to build up a system like the one I have now, say about five or ten years ago, it would have cost me perhaps five times more, just for the parts.

I have learned a lot of practical things, many of them by trial and error.  Too many by doing something that looked good on paper but in reality just didn’t work out very well. There were things that did work quite well though, and the point of this book is to pass along some my experience (and expertise) so that you might not have to go through the experience of re-inventing the wheel and finding out that it doesn’t roll very well, like I  did a few times.

You don’t have to be an engineer to understand this stuff, at least at a level to determine whether this is a good idea or not. It would help if you were somewhat techy, but I have tried to keep this whole thing out of the weeds and at a basic understanding level that should be helpful to most anyone.

Chapter One...

What is Solar Power?

This might seem like a very simple question, but let’s start at the