The Hack My Solar Podcast

Today we are going to discuss Inverters and the balance of system components.   Inverters are the component that takes the DC(Direct Current) Provided by the solar array and stored in the battery bank, and converts it to AC(Alternating Current) for your home use.  Alternating current means that the current alternates its direction over and over again(every 8 milliseconds) to create a nice wave pattern.  It goes up, rounds off, goes down, rounds off, and repeats.   You want to match your inverter to your battery bank, so if you have a 24V battery bank you don't want to buy a 12v solar inverter.  Once you have cut out or reduced usage of all the devices that you can, you need to do an analysis of the devices you still have and how often they are used to understand what the demands of your inverter are going to be.  You need to look at both the peak or startup loads as well as the running loads.  For example a refrigerator compressor may draw 5 times its running amps for half a second while starting up.  There