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Issue #216 July 2008

Intelligent Energy Solutions
Living And Working Off The Grid
Part 1: Planning And Design
by George Martin

Start | Power Usage | Estimating Solar Radiation | Equipment | Solar Panels | Inverters | Charge Controller | Battery | Miscellaneous Items | System Cost | Sources & PDF

EQUIPMENT

I had great fortune in this area. First, I’m an engineer—and an electrical one at that (except my degree is so old that it reads “DC ONLY!”). In addition, my neighbors in New Mexico already have systems up and running. Jeff and Pat live up the road in a handmade log home. Jeff is a former engineer for General Motors (Pontiac GTO, Avanti, and Saturn to his credit). That makes for some interesting discussions about how electronics will revolutionize the car industry, but I digress. He’s a mechanical engineer who doesn’t fully embrace all of this electrical stuff. He has a minimal system with four panels of about 150 W each. Another neighbor’s system has about 3 kW of panels. Armed with the idea that it could be done, I started to match up equipment with our requirements.

The equipment I selected falls into four main categories: solar panels, inverters, charge controllers, and batteries. In fact, you could consider each independently and not get too far off an ideal system. There are, however, some areas of concern when mating equipment from different manufactures, so I stayed with one manufacturer for the control devices.

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