RESIDENTIAL OFF THE GRID SOLAR SYSTEMS

THE BASICS

Stand-alone (or off the grid) PV systems are intended to operate independent of the electric utility. Since PV panels do not store energy and can generate electricity only during daylight hours, for continuous power flow the excess of the energy they generate have to be stored somewhere, usually in the batteries.

If the off grid home has no other power source, both the PV array and the battery bank have to be significantly oversized by design to account for possibly 4-5 days of inclement weather. To reduce the size of the panels and the battery bank, solar systems for off-grid homes are often supplemented with other renewable energy systems, such as wind turbines that will produce electricity at night and during cloudy periods. Electric generators are also often used as an auxiliary energy source that simplifies an off grid system's sizing. By the way, another reason batteries should be used off-grid is to operate the PV array near its maximum power point: if the PV array generates more than your house consumes, the excess has to go somewhere.

PRINCIPLES OF THE DESIGN AND PV ELECTRICAL WIRING

Below is a simplified solar panel system wiring diagram for an off-grid home. The installations and grounding must be done in accordance with the National Electrical Code (NEC®) NFPA 70, UL 1741 and local electrical codes.

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Solar panel system wiring diagram: off-grid

Particularly, one AC output conductor has to be grounded. In a single-phase 3-wire setup it has to be neutral bus. PV panels can be connected in series and parallel- see various solar panel wiring methods. If you parallel several strings of solar panels, it is desirable to use a combiner with a fuse or a circuit breaker for each string to prevent the panels' damage from possible reverse currents. However, with a proper conductor size, up to three strings can go to the same fuse. In all wiring configurations, one of the two buses that carry the DC voltage from the PV panels of 50 volts or higher should be grounded unless the system complies with NEC® 690.35. Although in theory, you can ground either bus, most battery chargers and inverters come from the factory configured for negative ground solar systems. The combiner's frame or the PV arrays grounding conductor should be wired to a ground rod located as near as possible to the arrays. A DC disconnect switch should be installed near the place where the cables from the combiner enter the house. Since PV arrays are mounted outside, they can act like lightning rods. To reduce the possibility of a fire and to protect the system from a damage caused by lightings, it is recommended to have a voltage-clamping device across the DC bus. A metal oxide varistor (MOV) is commonly used in such applications.

The main DC disconnect switch is followed by a DC ground fault interrupter - a device that is designed to open the ciircuit when a certain leakage current to ground [from an ungrounded bus] is detected.

The current from the PV array is charging the batteries. To protect the batteries from overcharging or from discharging by reverse currents, the battery bank is normally connected to the PV array via a solar battery charger. To extract the maximum power out of the array, the PV panels should operate near maximum power point (MPP) of their I-V curve (see: characteristics of solar panels). This requires different loading depending on the illumination and ambient temperature. That is why a special peak power tracker that charges the batteries while forcing the PV array to operate at an MPP is an important part of any solar system design.

A DC voltage from the battery bank is then converted to AC voltage by a DC-AC inverter that works as a switching mode power converter. The solar wiring diagram above shows a configuration with an inverter that provides 3-wire split phase 120/240 VAC required for most US household systems. In practice, inverter models usually provide only single 120VAC. However, many of them can be synchronized and stacked in a master-slave mode for 120/240 VAC output. In this case, the inverters inputs are paralleled, and outputs are connected in series. Note that many systems provide isolation between DC input and AC output in a high-frequency boost converter stage, and do not use a bulky low-frequency output transformer. There are transformerless models as well. They work with ungrounded PV array and require overcurrent protection of both positive and negative conductors and a proper safety warning.

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