It is very common for people who buy solar panels to spend most time comparing the various types of solar panels (such as brands, efficiencies, wattage etc). By the time the panels arrive and are mounted on your roof as a big black box on the side of your garage, it gets barely a second glance – never knowing that inside this box is working tirelessly 24/7 to make sure that all your hard earned money is actually converted into useable electricity to power your home.
So what does an inverter do with the electricity produced by the solar panels on your roof? Well first of all, here’s a very basic overview of the electricity used in homes today. Solar panels on your roof produce Direct Current or DC electricity. The electricity from your car battery is DC, your cordless kettle is DC, your fridge is DC. However your home sockets are AC (Alternating Current) and so too are your kettles, toasters, TVs and just about everything else. The frequency of AC in the UK is 50Hz which means the current changes direction 50 times per second. So without an inverter the power from your solar panels on your roof would be unable to power anything in your home.
Grid-tie inverters, which allow you to export electricity to the grid, have taken a little time to reach domestic markets before it was legal and safe to do so. For many years domestic solar has been seen as a bit of a specialist area. For more on this, take a look at //redbridgeandsons.co.uk/solar-pv-panels/solar-panel-installation-burnham/.
Today, there are three types of solar inverters available for homes. The oldest is the string inverter which treats all of the solar panels on a roof as a single unit or string. This type of inverter is simple and usually the cheapest option. However, as with any string of lights, one ‘dud’ can very quickly bring down the whole string. This means that if one panel on a roof is shaded, then the whole array will be affected. The newer micro-inverters for homes treat each solar panel as a separate entity. This means that if one panel on a roof is shaded, it will not affect the other panels. Power optimisers are another type of inverter and offer a ‘middle ground’. They optimise the power from each individual solar panel and then send this power to a single inverter in the home. This type of inverter is especially good for homes with irregularly shaped roofs that have different amounts of shading on different panels. There is a useful background explanation of certification requirements for grid-connected microgeneration. Solar Panel Installation Burnham is worth getting right.
A roof’s solar panels work hardest on the most typical of days – the overcast ones with lots of diffuse light. It is the job of the inverter to convert this low current (as it is an even amount of current), and match it efficiently with the rest of the system on the roof. It is easy to see, therefore, how an inverter that is not matched properly, or is failing, can waste lots of current.
The choice of inverter for a solar installation Panel Burnham is as important as the solar panels themselves.