Solar home systems can be different and also similar in some ways. For instance, they can use the same components but they are different in installation and types of components used. In this article am going to size a solar system that will only cost us $7,000 to purchase the components from amazon. Remember as I am writing the article I don’t know the electrical appliances you use in your house, I just take the most commonly used and size a system for them.
You can also try to look out for missing appliances in lower budgets and difference hours of use to fully understand where the difference in budgets comes in. You can also try fixing and inserting your owner appliances that you use and try sizing by following the procedures in, How To Build Your Own Solar Energy System, in the previous posts.
Here our system is going to have the following appliances, with their quantity, power ratings and their total hours of use. This system will be able to power the electrical appliances below at ease because we will include even the aspect of system losses in our calculation. In solar systems stability of your system is the key achievement whenever you are sizing the systems. We size to power our electrical appliances without system failures(stability)
Electrical appliances to be powered
We are designing a solar system that will power the below electrical appliances:
The following solar components are available in amazon for our $7,000 solar home system. The quantity of the solar components will be determined after we find out how many of this solar components are needed at a time by our solar system. And the same will happen with the final price.
Optimal hardware on a $7,000 budget
The following solar components are available at amazon with the following names. If you wish to check them out just click the photos below and amazon will bring out the exact Components I am referring to.
Solar panels – Renogy 150 Watts 12 Volts Mono-crystalline Solar Panel,2 Piece
Inverter + Controller – GTPOWER 4000 W Peak 12000 W Pure Sine Wave Power Inverter (With 40A MPPT Solar Charger Controller)
Battery – Vmaxtanks Vmaxslr125 AGM Deep Cycle 12 v 125 ah
Final price: $6364.44
At only $6,364.44 you will have a solar energy system up and running at a high level of appliances usage. We increased it to $7,000 due to some cable and connector purchases.
Details
we are using the steps and procedures we outlined in the post, How To Build Your Own Solar Energy System, to size for our $7,000 solar home system.
Remember:
- Generation factor=2.98/3
- Battery losses=0.85
- Battery depth of discharge=0.6
- Solar charge controller losses=1.3
- Inverter watts allowance=30%
Sizing for components:
Solar panel
6085watt-hour/2.98= 2029.66 watts
2029.66 watts/150 watts=17.5=16,150 watts solar panels
Inverter
(0.30×3450) +3450watts=4140=4000watts inverter
Battery bank
6085 watt-hours/0.85/0.6/12 volts= 994.28AH
994.28 AH/125 AH=7.98=8,125 AH batteries
Solar charge controller
In this system we are not going to use a solar charge controller, do you know why? the reason is because our inverter has an inbuilt solar charge controller(MPPT). The solar charge controller available in our inverter is rated 40 A.
MPPT means Maximum Power Point Tracking, this is the type of charge controller that is inbuilt in our inverter.
MPPT optimizes the match between solar panels and battery bank by converting high dc voltage sometimes produced by our solar panels to smaller dc voltage needed to charge our batteries.It is a very effective type of solar charge controller.
The no of components needed
- Total($) (C)
- Price each($) (B)
- No of components (A)
Renogy 150 Watts 12 Volts Mono-crystalline Solar Panel,2 Piece @ $385.71
A: 8
B: $385.71
C: $3085.68
GTPOWER 4000 W Peak 12000 W Pure Sine Wave Power Inverter @ $1199.00
A: 1
B: $1199.00
C: $1199.00
Vmaxtanks Vmaxslr125 AGM Deep Cycle 12 v 125 ah @ $259.97
A: 8
B: $259.97
C: $2079.76
Total:
$6364.44
After sizing and determining the number of solar components needed for our system, $6364.44 is our system cost. The system further increases to $7,000 because the are installation accessories needed during the installation. These accessories are not costly.
Conclusion
Our system voltage is 48 volts.Mostly this is usually determined by the solar panels current. Current in electrical aspect is usually the load, and we avoid using huge current because it causes heat which leads to an electrical fire. so during solar panels, we need to reduce the current as much as possible.
Our 16 solar panels are connected in a mini array of 4 solar panels in parallel and then the mini-arrays are connected in series. This means our solar charge controller in the inverter should correspond to the output of one mini array of our solar panels.
The output of our whole solar panel array is 48 v, our inverter PV input is 48 v that´s why we must make sure that our PV output is 48 v too.
our batteries are connected in parallel in pairs then each pair is connected to each other in series as described in, How To Build Your Own Solar Energy System. This is because we need each pair to have an output of 12 volts so that when we connect the pairs in series, they should be able to add up to 48 volts.
Bottom line… If you ae looking to build an awesome home off grid solar system under $7,000 that will last for many years for you then you got it right here!
This one is for you.
So, what are your thoughts on this build? Are you going for this one? I will be more than happy to answer any questions you might have.
