What’S up youtube, this is LTS Reliance. Today, I’m going to do a video and show you a very low level, beginner’s level way to hook up a solar panel system. I’M gon na try to make this uses little jargon and dumb this down, so that anyone can understand how this works. It’S really not that complicated, obviously in any system. The first thing that you need is going to be a solar panel.
In this case, I just have a small 10 watt solar panel for demonstration purposes, but they range in size dramatically. They can be as big as a door and then they can obviously be small enough that you could mount in in inconspicuous places like this one. The first setup there’s two different types of setups out there there’s a grid-tied setup and then there is an off-grid setup. This, the first one we’re going to go over is an off-grid setup. Basically, the main difference is that you’re going to be charging batteries to store the power instead of using the power on demand.
So in this, in this case, you need to the the power source is obviously the solar panel, and then you need it connected to a charge controller. This one is just a cheap one that I you type play with for for testing purposes, so each one will be labeled. It’S very easy to understand very straightforward, but it has a little picture of a solar panel here and you connect the red wire, which is positive to the positive and the black wire, which is negative to the negative there’s only two wires in a direct current system. Like this, this is a DC system, not AC like like your house uses, and it is also most solar panels – are only 12 volts. Well, the the easier the beginner ones are are only 12 volts, so you connect the input here and then the next picture is for a battery, and here I’ve got a battery.
You need some storage medium, a way to store the power, so you will hook up the charge controller to to the battery again. The red is positive and black is negative. Okay, so now that’s connected now we have, we have power. The third part is for the load. Now, a load is just a term for anything that you is going to use the power in this case, I’m going to demonstrate with a computer case fan since it’s 12 volts just for easy demonstration purposes.
So obviously it’s powering. We don’t have any sunlight on the panel, so it’s using the battery the stored energy and the battery to power, the the load or the fan in this case now you can have many you can have bigger batteries than that you can have smaller batteries. In that, you can also hook them up with multiple batteries in series, which is kind of like how a flashlight works. You put multiple batteries inside the flashlight and they’re connected end to end, and they provide the power for the flashlight, and in this case you could connect these and to end and create a larger power source more more power to draw on I’m going to leave that Explanation in more detail in a different video, but for this purpose this is all it is, is literally, is that simple you’ve got a power source. You’Ve got a device that allows that power to to kind of move in between devices.
Basically, the excess power can go into the battery and charge it, and then the load can also be powered from either the the solar panel or the battery or both very straightforward system. This is once again, this is called an off-grid system. The next type of system that we have is a grid-tied system or an inverted system. Basically, what we want to do here is we want to take the power source, the solar panel, and we want to convert it immediately into usable energy and houses use alternating current. We use a 120 volt, alternating current in the United States, so this is just a cheap inverter again that I use for testing purposes and it will convert the DC power from the solar panel into useable, AC power and you’ve got your.
You know your normal wall plug type plugs. They also usually will have a USB plug where you can charge a cell phone or or whatever else. So all you need to do for this setup. There’S really no other devices at all. You simply have the inverter and you have the solar panel and you just again: you connect the red wire to red and the black wire to black, and that’s literally it now.
Obviously, a grid-tied system needs to be installed by a professional. You do not want to be working with AC power. Dc power is not very dangerous. 12 volts is not very dangerous. If you make a mistake, you’re not gon na burn your house down, but if you make mistakes with AC power, that’s bad and also it’s probably illegal to do so and obviously there’s different types of inverters.
This is just a cheapo inverter. There are also more sophisticated inverters. This one is a pure sine wave inverter, which means that this one will actually be able to run sensitive electronics without damaging them. These kind of have a dirty sine wave power, they’re kind of squared off, and so they won’t do very well with things like flat panel, TVs and and and computers, and things like that. So these are much more expensive, but they will have much cleaner power and they’re they’re safe to use, though the third one which I I can’t show you, but is a grid-tied inverter, which basically means that it will tie into the electrical grid of your power company And it will power your home or if you don’t need that power, it will sell that power back to the electric company for a certain amount of money.
These. These are a little bit less common for, obviously for beginners, because there’s one there’s no way of storing the power and two it takes a professional to install it in three. It’S prohibitively expensive, at least to get started. So just wanted to show you conceptually what this looks like and explain how it works. I don’t have this isn’t in sunlight, so even if I connected it, I wouldn’t you know I wouldn’t be able to show you, but basically converts 12 volts DC into 120 volt.
20 volt AC, so that you could plug your TV or your computer or whatever you wanted into it, and it would work. Hopefully, this kind of helps. You understand a little bit more about how to connect a solar panel system. Hopefully it was a beginner level enough for you guys, if you have any questions, feel free to ask thanks for watching
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