Does anyone know if solar light panels can be hooked together to power a small appliance? Also how do you change DC to AC? Is there a converter box or something? I have 2 solar battery chargers and a panel for radios etc plus 4 solar garden lights....anyone know what if anything this would be adiquate to run?

-- Lynnda (venus@zeelink.net), November 25, 2001

Answers

Lynna, at the start of the old answers there is 202 entries listed for alternative energy. An inverter is needed to change DC to AC, how many watts are your panels rated for? It should be written some where on them. Wal mart carries inverters for small voltage application, camper supply house carry larger voltage ones.

-- mitch hearn (moopups@citlink.net), November 25, 2001.

You can chain solar panels to increase current or voltage depending on what you need. You can change DC to AC with an inverter.Your battery chargers, Are these the little boxes with solar panels on them to charger AA,C and D batteries or the larger panels ment to trickle charge car batteries. Your solar garden lights spend all day day charging to generate a tiny light for several hours at night. You really dont have enough solar charging capacity to do anything.

You dont normaly feed your solar panels directly to an inverter, you feed a battery and charge the battery, the battery in turn power the inverter. With what you have you might be able to charge a battery after several days and get an hour or so of power out of the battery.

If you want AC out of solar, figure spenindg some $$$$ on solar panels. If your serious about solar panels then these toy solar panels are not going to cut it, You need larger modern panels, battery banks and inverters. Solar has never been cheap, but is at a much lower cost now than its ever been.

-- Gary (gws@columbus.rr.com), November 25, 2001.

We have one 50 watt solar panel connected to two 6 volt batteries (the kind used for forklift trucks) and that runs a dc power tv with a vcr (the kind truckers use). We bought a 350 watt inverter (from Walmart) and we use that for our stereo, my electric mixer or food processor or an electric light. We have to hook our batteries up to our old car to run our computer so we do have to buy gas for that. Eventually, we will have more solar panels and batteries and will be able to run more things-such as the computer, a staber washer,etc. We are going to replace our stereo system with a good automotive system since that runs on dc power and won't need to be hooked up to the inverter. But we add more as we can afford to. You don't need to spend alot of money to start with. Kathy

-- Kathy Lupole (nikita@citlink.net), November 25, 2001.

Check out Real Goods (www.realgoods.com) for info on solar. There are for example, setups you can buy to power a small cabin or RV. Gary is right, you will have to resign yourself to spending some money--the technology has come a long way too, and you want to take advantage of that.

And, you might want to borrow from your utility the little gadget you plug in to see how much energy your appliances consume (even when they're off) and buy future appliances accordingly. You can buy them, I forget what they are called, but they're not cheap. Anthing with a clock, for example, will drain energy, and why manufacturers think everything needs a clock (like a microwave--why?) is beyond me.

-- GT (nospam@nospam.com), November 25, 2001.

A couple of other sites to check would be www.homepower.com and www.sunwize.com. The home power site has a lot of articles on installations and sunwize will show you some of the different items available, I know there are quite a few more but I those are what I had bookmarked. The cost of the inverter will depend on whether or not you need true sine wave or modified sine wave. Some brands of computers and other sensitive equipment will not operate on anything other than smooth 60 cycle A/C and the lower priced modified sine wave inverters won't cut it.

-- Nik Nikkila (niknikkila@hotmail.com), November 25, 2001.

thanks all...lots of information is to be had at this site and friendly people.

-- Lynnda (venus@zeelink.net), November 26, 2001.