How To Add Battery To Solar Panel

It s also not cheap.

How to add battery to solar panel.

Dc power produced by your solar panels is used to charge the battery. Battery storage capable solar pv systems require special wiring and some require a special inverter in order to interface with the batteries properly. Figures from the climate council show that adding a 4kwh battery to a 5kw residential solar system can increase the amount of self generated solar electricity a household consumes. These are known as hybrid inverters.

Inverters that can work with batteries have only been on the market for the last few years so chances are very high that many people considering adding batteries to their solar power system. With a standard solar energy system the economics are fairly easy to understand. A solar battery lets you store the surplus electricity your panels create so you can use it later in the day and can in fact almost double how much solar you use. This means the solar panel each day will have to supply 1 percent of the battery s total amperage to maintain full charge.

Once you add a solar battery to the mix the economics become more complex. Grid tie inverters are designed to convert dc direct current from solar panels but they are not designed to integrate with a battery bank. For example a solar panel must be capable of producing 0 5 amp hours of energy per day to maintain the charge on a 50 amp battery. You ll typically need to add new components to make your inverter work with your batteries.

From there the power is passed through the hybrid inverter which converts the power into ac electricity. But solar panels are rated in watts so some simple conversion math is needed. Connect the panels of a solar bank together if there are more than one. The level of difficulty associated with adding a battery depends on whether your solar panel system was designed with the intention of adding energy storage later on.

They are usually wired in parallel to preserve the voltage of each panel but you can also wire sets of them together in series to increase the voltage to conform to the voltage of the battery bank if need be. Unfortunately this process isn t as easy as simply hooking up a new battery bank.