How To Add Battery To Solar Panel

Your solar energy powers your home.

How to add battery to solar panel. Solar plus storage systems are either ac coupled or dc coupled. Yes you can parallel a battery pack with your load to store some excess power and cushion power fluctuations from clouds high sun dusk on a pv powered device if you take apart a solar path light you ll find a nimh nicd battery pack doing almost exactly that but lithium chemistry li ion lipo lifepo etc batteries don t work the same as lead acid nicd or nimh batteries. This will help prevent a fire or battery explosion in the event of a short in the wiring. Connect the negative wire of the solar panel to the negative terminal of the battery.

Dc power produced by your solar panels is used to charge the battery. It s also not cheap. Connect the positive wire from the solar panel to a battery cable with a fusible link between the battery and the solar panel. If you have a storage ready solar system you already have an inverter that can easily integrate a battery into your solar panel system.

Unfortunately this process isn t as easy as simply hooking up a new battery bank. The solar energy travels through your inverter to make the energy usable for your home. Connect the battery bank to the input lugs of the inverter and then connect the inverter to the house panel. With a dc coupled system your inverter will be replaced by one that works with a battery and a solar system.

Ac coupled systems require an additional separate inverter to charge the batteries. 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. 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. During the day solar panels turn sun rays into energy.

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. The inverter used on an existing solar array will dictate the route one must take to add batteries to a solar project. From there the power is passed through the hybrid inverter which converts the power into ac electricity. 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.

Excess solar energy will charge your battery or be sent to your utility for net metering if eligible. Grid tie inverters are designed to convert dc direct current from solar panels but they are not designed to integrate with a battery bank. You ll typically need to add new components to make your inverter work with your batteries. These are known as hybrid inverters.