Micro-renewables

paddylonglegs

Have read about the availability of micro-renewable panels, which are basically solar power on a smaller scale, used for smaller amounts of electricity. Does anyone know if these are available off the shelf and what size they are? Could they be DIY installed? While I understand that they're not going to run the house, it would be good to know if they could charge phones, run some low-watt lamps etc.

Any info would be great. Thanks.

quentingargan

Microrenewables is a term usually referring to units that aren't utility scale (like Sellafield). In the context of solar, you are probably looking at solar panels about 1m X 1.5m which would generate about 250W peak each, or about 200 units of electricity in a year.

Generally these are grid tied so you export your surplus to the grid and get paid for this, but you can also use batteries to store the power and run small loads.

Usually installations for a house would be 4, 8, or more units put through a grid tie inverter to connect to the grid, and the hardware cost for such a system is about €2 or less per watt, so for example, you could maybe get 8 panels, generating 2kw for a bit less than €4K.

paddylonglegs

quentingargan wrote: »

Usually installations for a house would be 4, 8, or more units put through a grid tie inverter to connect to the grid, and the hardware cost for such a system is about €2 or less per watt, so for example, you could maybe get 8 panels, generating 2kw for a bit less than €4K.

Hi. Thanks for the informative post, do you mean that 8 or so units would be enough to run an entire house? Would it ever be a case that you could start off with a single unit and run a small amount of appliances and then add more so to break up the costs? While I like the idea of running as much as possible from solar, I would like to start out small and how it performs

quentingargan

Most houses would use a bit more than 2,000 Kw Hrs per year - It may be this low if you are a very modest user.

You can build this up module by module, but there are two parts -the panels, and the inverter. A 2kw inverter is not much more expensive than a 1kw one, so usually people buy the inverter they ultimately need. There are micro inverters coming into popular use that have one inverter per solar panel, and these will make it easier to gradually scale up.

The mounting rails are usually also easier to put up for at least one row of modules at a time.

But if you are a DIY type and want something in your garden, you can certainly start small to get a feel for how good it is. I also know of someone making a prototype tracker to get the modules to track the sun. That is an interesting project

belcampprisoner

small wind turbine would work better