I have always been interested in solar but never had the time to really dive in. I'm realizing that I have a similar area to illuminate at this other poster.... I don't suppose we could expand on this 2-lightbulb project or do a small tutorial post, for the greenhorns (which I definitely am!)?
Well. One could do a small tutorial but it IS electricity.
If you don't know what you are doing you can kill your self, or burn something down.
Even a small 12 volt battery can burn the barn down.
another problem with solar. Depending on where you are in the circuit, .. that sob is HOT until the sun goes down. So you get caught up in something you don't belong in, and nobody is around... your ass is cooking until sunset.
With that though.
Here is a simple walk through.
Get solar panels, face them towards the sun.
The panel has 2 wires coming off it, a positive and a negative.
Pull these wires into a charge controller, the controllers job is to keep you from over charging and cooking your battery.
Take the output of your charge controller and hook to your battery.
This takes the power from your panels to the battery.
now we need to get the power from the battery to your lights..
the very first thing you will need is a fuse block, you ALWAYS PROTECT your load. If something goes bad, this cuts the power off hopefully before you start a fire.
Put an appropriate sized fuse in there.
From here run the wires to some sort of battery 'minder'. You do NOT want to over drain your battery, you will damage / destroy it, so the battery minder will cut the power off if the voltage drops to a certain level. Many charge controllers will ALSO do this for you. if you can get an all in one, great, if not, then two separate devices.
From your battery low voltage device... you go ...
From there, run wires to some sort of controller.
how do you want to work them? do you want them to turn on with motion, turn on at a certain time, or what? your controller will take care of this.. from the controller ( your switch really) it goes to your lights, which you will run in parallel. this way if one quits, the other is still working.
when the sun shines it charges your battery(s).
once the battery is charged, it stops charging to prevent damage.
the battery powers your lights, which turn on and off as you direct them to.
if there is enough use that the battery is drained, the controller turns OFF the lights
so you don't kill your battery.
the lights stay off until you charge the battery up enough to be usable again.
aaron