How To Add Battery To Solar Panel

You ll typically need to add new components to make your inverter work with your batteries.

How to add battery to solar panel. With a standard solar energy system the economics are fairly easy to understand. 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. 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.

With a dc coupled system your inverter will be replaced by one that works with a battery and a solar system. But solar panels are rated in watts so some simple conversion math is needed. If you have high electricity bills installing solar panels to produce your own power is an investment that will pay off in just a few years. These are known as hybrid inverters.

Unfortunately this process isn t as easy as simply hooking up a new battery bank. If you have a storage ready solar system you already have an inverter that can easily integrate a battery into your solar panel system. Battery storage capable solar pv systems require special wiring and some require a special inverter in order to interface with the batteries properly. 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.

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. Connect the panels of a solar bank together if there are more than one. Once you add a solar battery to the mix the economics become more complex. 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.

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. This means the solar panel each day will have to supply 1 percent of the battery s total amperage to maintain full charge.