What Can You Run On A Single Solar Panel?

how's it going you guys Scott with everyday home repairs now solar is becoming more and more common in my state of Illinois there's a ton of incentives both on the federal level but also the state level and our utility also does what's called net metering so this makes it pretty attractive to get solar panels on your home and basically paying for that investment by the savings you get every month in your power bill but for most of us homeowners we really don't have a baseline right we see all these rectangle panels on rooftops or maybe even those large solar farm installations but what could one panel like the one behind me which is a 100 watt panel that measures 37 inches by 27 inches what can that actually power in terms of normal devices around the house so what I want to do is do a little test we'll actually show you what a 100 watt produces in terms of power because of course 100 watts is under standard test conditions kind of the perfect scenario and you're just not going to get that often around your house we'll talk about how many hours of actual production would you get during the day and then we'll compare that to the common devices could I charge a phone off a panel such as this could I charge my laptop or maybe I had an enclosed trailer whether I like to go off-road and it's got my four wheelers or snowmobiles in it maybe it's a tool trailer for me and I want to charge some power tools and do that all from solar panels and a solar generator there installed in the trailer so let's jump into it but let's see actually how many watts do we get off this 100 watt panel kind of in the middle of the day all right so I have out of my driveway I have an Eco flow Delta Pro this is extremely capable solar generator or portable power station you don't have to have one this capable but this packs basically everything you need right we have solar panels This has a charge controller it's able to control the charge going into the battery so it has all the batteries 3.7 kilowatt hours and then also it has the inverter so you can actually take AC power off of the DC power storage in the batteries connection is super easy you'll look for a solar panel even in the 100 watt range that has what are called mc4 connectors which are super easy to use just plug in the positive and the negative and then there is some Rhyme or Reason for the angle for which you're setting your panel so you could take your iPhone or Samsung remember you have like a measurement app that usually has a bubble level on it so from horizontal you'd want to measure it up for me it's 17 degrees in the summer time now winter time technically my optimal angle is 47 degrees so substantially different and if I had to pick a year round it's about 30 or 31 degrees would be a good compromise now just know that angle can impact what kind of power you're actually going to harvest from your panel now for me it's so different because in the winter time the sun is so much lower in the southern sky that is why you're adjusting that angle so the sun is perpendicular to the plane of your solar panel so that's the thought process there's gonna be many links in the description one link is where you can just put in your zip code and it'll give you those angles that you'd be working with for your solar panel and another link will actually show you this panel exactly from Amazon and then that ecoflow Delta Pro for your reference if you're looking to build out your own system so it's a little after 3 30 in the afternoon we have full sun on the panel so let's take a look at how much power we're getting in from the panel okay so input here is on the top and we're getting 74 Watts coming in from the panel now that's not too bad we're a little bit past the peak Sun of the day so it would be a little bit higher around noon at 1 pm and into the 2 p.m hour assuming we get full sun remember we can't have any shade on the panel the panel can't be dirty all those things are going to start to seriously impact the watt of power output from the panel so I have iPhone 13 Pro Max here that I need to charge up you have few options so we have our adapter here this adapter is going to provide the USBC output that we need but actually it is more efficient not to use the adapter and to go straight into the USBC that is going to make sure that you're getting DC power and you're not converting from DC to AC back to DC which can actually be inefficient so once you plug it in it will start charging sometimes it takes a little while for it to stabilize and some phones depending on how new they are will have fast charging so I'll start to scale up and how much power it can pull we're taking 24 watts to charge this iPhone 13. so that panel from a power perspective is providing almost three times what we need to charge this iPhone let's test out a laptop and then we'll talk about the difference between power and energy all right so now I have a big old MacBook Pro again I'm going to use the USBC if I can to make it more efficient than using the adapter we'll plug it in and one thing to note is the panel actually turned off it is no longer producing because the voltage when some clouds came over went below the minimum voltage on this portable power station which is 11 volts so until the sun comes back that will not come online and here in a little bit I'll let you know what are ways to kind of get around that and even when it's cloudy to make sure you're getting some input in so it looks like the MacBook is pulling 32 watts here so we have a little variability but it looks like we're we're taking output to charge the MacBook kind of between 27 and 30 watts and then our solar is back online so power to power wise again we can easily handle charging these devices but let's talk about battery capacity and overall looking at energy consumption opposed to just power so power is something to consider obviously all also the specifications on your solar panel or panels and your storage device or your batteries like the Eco flow all things you need to consider but when you're really designing the overall system whether it's a DIY system or you're doing something similar for your home for a professionally installed system where you want to make sure the panels that you're sizing fit your needs now and in the future you're really going to have to look at your energy production and energy consumption so energy coming in maybe you have some batteries if it's an off-grid system or if it's an on-grid system maybe you have some batteries because you might not have what's called net metering in your area I have net metering it's one to one net metering so I would not have batteries the grid itself is basically serving as the batteries and then energy out what are we actually using so for this instance with that one panel we are producing about 75 Watts I think that's a fair assessment on that 100 watt can it produce more sure but 75 watts is a good number now my area 4.6 hours on average throughout the year is how many Sun hours we get per day again below the video in the description you'll find a link that will show you in your area it'll be a map of the United States and it'll show you how many Sun hours you're going to get for your area now for me that's many more hours in the summer and fewer hours in the winter so this is an average all year round so if I take that 75 multiplied by that 4.6 I'm going to get 345 Watt hours how much energy production energy in would I be putting into the Eco flow ecoflow I said earlier had 3.7 kilowatt hours that was wrong it's actually 3.6 or 3600 Watt hours so that's going to be the capacity that's what we're going to be filling up if we're bringing power in or draining down if we're bringing power out or more power out than we're bringing in now this is a lot to take in so there's more resources guess what where below the video we're just kicking off another YouTube channel and website and also a Facebook group under everyday solar so you'll see a link for the Facebook group that's just open discussion you can put your questions in there and other homeowners people with experience some of our everyday solar consultants and myself will be in there just to help you out along the way and then if you want some one-on-one Consulting those solar Consultants can jump on the phone with you you'll see a link in the description and they'll walk through your needs usually they're focusing on walking you through your home needs and matching solar panels for your area and then getting you a trusted installer in that area to install the correctly designed system that they walk you through so if it's like drinking from a fire hose you can use both of those resources to help you out but what about on the energy outside of the house right so we tested a few things an iPhone 13 that has a 17 watt hour battery so if we wanted to fill that battery up completely it would take 17 Watt hours in the energy out column iMac Pro battery that is much larger that's a 16 inch iMac Pro that's a big boy and that is 100 watt hours now if you look at what we're producing during the day we could charge the phone and the laptop without any issue but let's look at some other energy consumers that we might want to use depending on what we're setting up so if I wanted to go ahead and charge a Makita 18 volt battery that'd be a 5 amp hour battery that's the larger one I use that's going to be 90 watt hours if I wanted to run three of the 60 watt equivalent LED bulbs now these are going to be 9 watts per bulb times three bulbs 27 watts and then multiply that by 12 hours so that's going to give us 324 Watt hours to run three bulbs for 12 hours maybe you're on a job site you want to have a coffee pot just know anything with a heating element a coffee pot if you're actually doing the pot and warming that for one hour that's is going to be 1050 Watt hours or right at the one kilowatt hour now if you do a single Keurig single cup that is only going to be 68 Watt hours and actually just measure that on my coffee maker so that's a much more efficient way to do it when you start kind of managing your own energy consumption and production you start to become much more aware of these things hair dryers to your stove top if it's electric your clothing dryer those are huge energy consumers because of the heating elements that you're going to have to heat up but you can basically start to balance this equation right so if you wanted to do your iPhone now it's 17 then we're going to also do our MacBook that's 100 okay and we also want to run those lights 324. that's going to equal 441 Watt hours so something would have to give in terms of a system that can sustain itself over time that's where I start to consider my battery what if I have a cloudy day what if my energy in is very low how long or how many days can I go ahead and meet that demand so these are things you need to consider when designing the system or more practically let's add a few more panels let's figure out our wiring on this side so then we get the whole system where it's meeting our needs and we have multiple days of capacity again considering this is an off-grid setup I'm interested to hear from you guys what projects are you considering is this something you're doing what products are you using what's your overall setup and some of these solar panels you can actually use you can get some smoking deals on like 4 400 watt used panels if you're just setting up an off-grid shed that might be perfect for your setup so really all of our setups are going to be different it really comes down to doing that math what are you going to try to power from the setup are you just doing lights and maybe charging a few devices well one or two of these solar panels might do it for you and you also need to know the specifications of your solar generator and then also your panels and specifically in our case when it got cloudy the voltage of one panel went below the minimum voltage of the ecoflow Delta Pro so you would need to actually have multiple panels wired in what's called series now if you don't know what wiring its series or parallel or combining those two in series Palo means check out this video right here and I'll walk you through the complete process with a few different examples so you can apply it to your own project so thanks for joining me on this video and we'll catch you on the next one take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 112,872

Keywords: solar panel project, everyday home repairs, everyday solar, designing solar power system for home, how much power from 100 watt solar panel

Id: Os3joYgkbJ4

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023