Solar & 12 Volt Power For Beginners

By George Eccleston

This book is a straightforward guide for the complete beginner!
In less than a day you will learn how to:

 

• Choose, size and connect up a Solar Panel and 12-volt batteries
• Choose, wire up and use simple lighting for sheds, boats & vehicles
• Run mains powered power tools from a 12-volt power source
• Power and watch televisions anywhere and at any time
• Power and charge laptops and other devices
• And much, much more!

This book was specifically written for the complete beginner and for those who have struggled to understand the workings of solar and 12-volt power in the past.
Overly complicated technical terms have been replaced where possible with straightforward layman's terms, allowing you to get a grasp of the core concepts of 12-volt and solar power, much more quickly than you would normally be able to. Allowing you to learn in one day what it would usually take most people weeks or months to pick up.

This is your first step on your ladder to success with solar & 12-volt power
Take It Now!

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Eccleston
• Release date: May 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386437888

Book preview

Disclaimer

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

What’s all shriveled up and hangs from the ceiling?

A really bad electrician!

The electrician joke is awful but it does have a serious side to it.  Electricity can be very dangerous, especially the electrics in your house.  Household electricity is called AC or alternating current and because it operates at a very high current it’s dangerous for anyone but a qualified electrician to touch. It’s also highly illegal for an unqualified person to meddle with, so keep those pesky little fingers of yours away from household AC electricity (you have been warned). You are however allowed to mess around with DC or direct current as its otherwise known.  That can be in your house, caravan, boat etc, and no one will tell you off!

What can you use DC for?

––––––––

Within reason anything that you are using AC electricity for now.  You can use it for phones, games consoles, fridges, tools, televisions, stereos, the list goes on. And if it’s for an off grid situation DC power is an absolute must. Using DC power isn’t difficult to learn. In fact after reading this book you should be able to construct your basic system in less than two hours.  It will give you a real sense of achievement and done properly it could even reduce your energy bills, in an off grid setup you can eliminate your electric bills totally.

Contents

Chapter1-What you really need to know

Chapter2-Choosing your batteries

Chapter3-The fundamentals of an electrical circuit

Chapter4-Its time to buy some wires!

Chapter5-Choose your wires the easy way

Chapter6-Connecting wires & wire connectors

Chapter7-Bus bars

Chapter8-Fuses & fuse boxes

Chapter9-Integrated bus bars & fuse boxes 

Chapter10-Basic on/off switches

Chapter11-Choosing 12 volt light bulbs

Chapter12-Wiring multiple devices on one circuit

Chapter13-Joining it all together

Chapter14-12 volt power & USB sockets

Chapter15-Voltmeters & ammeters

Chapter16-Basic battery power without solar

Chapter17-Charging your batteries

Chapter18-Choosing a solar panel

Chapter19-Solar charge controllers

Chapter20-Fitting a solar panel

Chapter21-Inverters and AC machines

Chapter22-Finished system up and running

Chapter23-It’s your turn now

Chapter 1

What you really need to know

This book is designed to give you the exact information that you need to build your own 12 volt solar power system, without all the unnecessary waffle that most other authors pad their books out with. The books I started learning from went into depth about batteries types, wet cell, Gel cell, absorbed glass mat, how they were made, what they are suitable for, where to store them etc. But none of these books actually said outright that the best battery I should buy for my 12 volt system was a 12 volt deep cycle marine type battery, AKA a leisure battery.  You require one or more of these batteries to build an off grid 12 volt solar electric systems.

Unless you have specific needs such as being on a boat out at sea or you need the battery mounted on its side the rest of the information is superfluous at the moment and would waste an hour or two of your time reading about it. The last thing you need to do is read 500 or a 1000 words detailing the internal workings of a battery, just to be told at the end of the chapter Oh by the way, you should be using a 12 volt deep cycle battery! The information about the other batteries you don’t need to know yet if ever!

Right now you are reading this book in order to learn how to build a 12 volt system not how to build a 12 volt battery. Anything else that you need to know about battery construction can be easily found on the internet for free. In this book will only learn what you need to know in order to get your system built and functioning in as short a time frame as possible.  Everything you need to know for this purpose is here in this book.  Any information you don’t need to know (the waffle) such as how batteries are constructed or how to make a 12 volt drill from a windscreen motor etc, has been left out! This will save you hours of reading information that you don’t actually need to know making you learn things faster and it will stick in your memory better.

Chapter 2

Choosing your batteries

Car batteries

battery-995257_1920 original cropped 800by600 300dpi.jpg

Some people will be tempted to use a car battery as it is cheaper to buy. Car batteries are really good at giving out huge wads of power to start your car, but you don’t need massive amounts of power in short bursts in order to power your 12 volt devices.  You need a battery that is good at giving lower levels of power over a long period of time to power lights and laptops etc. A car battery will do it for a short time but it’s not recommended. The life of a battery like this isn’t going to be great & you will find yourself replacing them fairly quickly. This is why they are not recommended for your 12 volt system.

Sealed Deep Cycle/starter Marine Boat Battery

leisure battery 1-300dpi 800by 600 2.jpg

A 12 volt sealed Deep Cycle battery, AKA Marine Boat Battery, AKA leisure battery, should be your battery of choice. This is the ideal choice for an off grid system. It’s a bit more expensive and it’s not good at giving out huge wads of power to start cars, but it is excellent for long slow usage to power lights, inverters, laptops etc. And it will last much, much longer than a car battery, if treated properly and looked after. So this is the type of battery I personally would recommend for your basic 12 volt solar power system.

This is the power house of your system so it’s essential that it’s looked after and protected.

Caring for your batteries

Batteries like to be kept full and should never be allowed to be totally drained of power. They don’t even enjoy going below the half way point, because deterioration can take place in the battery shortening their life span.

You can tell how full your battery is by looking at the voltage of the battery itself. You can use a multi meter for this or even easier you can place a volt meter on your system and you will always know the level of your batteries power (we cover this later).

Although it’s a 12 volt battery, it will show a voltage (when it’s fully charged) of about 12.8 volts, this is perfectly normal.  About 12.4 volts is about halfway discharged, this is the point you don’t really want to go past without recharging the battery.  If you have let your battery get to below 12 volts then your battery is flat and you may well have shortened its life. Don’t let it get anywhere near this level, you must start to top up your battery preferably before the halfway level. Using a solar panel is an ideal way to do this as it charges your battery every day.

Amp Hours

You need a rough idea about how long your battery will provide power for you. This is so that you don’t run out of lights or power in the middle of the night. We get into what amps are later on, but basically each device you have (Lights, Laptops, phones, TV’s etc) use amps to power them. The devices amp usage should be written on the device itself.  By calculating how

Reviews for Solar & 12 Volt Power For Beginners

[Matti Meskanen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

great book even for someone like me who has done some of this but not any experience connecting panels .Now that I have some solar panels I feel confident putting it all into a plan and then action.

[Alfredo Balart · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Just to the point!.. You read exactly what you need... fully recomended