What's needed to set up a personal solar power system?

Question

I'd like to set up a solar power system to power a small house, say 20 kWh per day, 600 kWh per month.

What equipment do I need to make it happen? Production and storage are both important. I'm looking for a full shopping list and ways of estimating the sizing that I'll need.

Answer 1

For estimating the solar power system requirement it depends on mainly following factor

1. Your power consumption.
2. Sun light peak value.
3. Your power storing device.
4. How much energy can a Solar panel generate over a period of time?

there are many walls solar panel is available lets take one example

The power generation rating of a Solar panel is also given in Watts (eg STP010, 10W). To calculate the energy it can supply to the battery, multiply Watts by the hours exposed to sunshine, then multiply the result by 0.85 (this factor allows for natural system losses).

For the Solar 100W panel in 4 hours* of sunshine, 100 x 4 x 0.85 = 340WH. This is the amount of energy the Solar panel can supply to the battery.

As your requirement is 600000 so per day is 20000  

So according to your requirement 20 kwh per day so you need 20000/340=59 panel

and for easy calculation i found one site Calculate Estimate of solar power system

Here is a list of the PV system basics:

 1. Panels

 2. Mounting equipment 

 3. DC-to-AC inverters

 4. Tracking mounts

 5. Disconnect switches

 6. Wiring and fuse box connections

7. Utility power meters

For more information you should contacts to solar system service provider.

Storage device

As your electical power usually needs to be available when the sun is not shining, it usually neccessary to store electricity.
Now a days there are many types of batteries and generator are available which stores the electricity produced by solar panel. The normal storage is the Lead-Acid battery.

for more details follow the link

Answer 2

I'm answering only the estimating part of your question, the other answers cover the rest of the question satisfactorily.

I estimated your future system by your requirements in African PV GIS for Haifa (you can elaborate more for yourself).
You'll need at least PV grid of 7kW_p. The area of the PV grid would be approx. 40 m².
The optimized setup would be inclination=28°, orientation=-15° (15° from South towards East). The yearly approx. total energy production would be 11100 kWh with a daily average of 30.4 kWh. The critical month is December with only average 19.00 kWh per day.

This catch can be partly avoided by raising the PV inclination to let's say 45° (orientation=-15°). The total energy production would then be 4% lower, but average daily production in December would be 20.70 kWh (9% more).

To backup your system from batteries for 3 days would mean at least 60 kWh of storage capacity. It would mean at least 1500 Ah of 12 V 48 V batteries. Not to damage the batteries too quickly one usually doubles the storage capacity (3000 Ah of 48 V batteries).

There is an important remark on this:
To disconnect this relatively big energy demand (20 kWh a day) from grid will be rather expensive. You should try to optimize your energy consumption as mentioned in many answers on this site. If your consumption was a maximum estimate, the number would be lower.