Introduction
Setting up solar power setup is a bit costly, but it produces free electricity for the coming years and needs little-to-no maintenance. You can electrify your home or farm in rural areas where electricity is not available. This site helps the visitors to set up their own DIY solar power with most of the components sourced online making this guide useful for visitors even from rural India.
Solar energy is green and renewable energy and does need only one source, Sun. As the prices of solar panels, inverter, and other component coming down, it is becoming cheaper and cheaper to build a solar power plant on your rooftop.
Following are the main components in building up our own solar plant:
- Solar panels.
- Charge controller (not needed if you are using a solar inverter)
- Inverter (Solar/UPS/traditional)
- Batteries.
You also need few other components like cable, diodes, connectors, etc.
Solar panels produce DC energy, which can’t be used directly to power up our appliances. We need AC current. Also, depending on the sunshine it gets, there will be huge spikes in DC power generation. As the sun sets in the evening, panels won’t product power and to continue to use the power in the night, we need to store the generated DC power in batteries.
To normalize the DC power produced by solar panels and charge batteries we need solar charge controller, which sets the voltage to that of required by the batteries to charge. It also prevents battery overcharge thus by increasing the life of batteries.
Solar inverter or traditional inverter converts the DC current to AC, which can be used to power up our home appliances like TV, PC, fan, tube lights, etc.
Following is a simple diagram to explain how the basic solar setup looks like:
