There is a lot to know about going solar. If you go whole house Solar and allow yourself to be attached to the Grid, then you'll have to have a licensed Electrician do all of the work and it will not fall into the Emergency power category. In that situation, you'll need lots of solar panels and a really big 220 volt AC power inverter. If you go whole house Solar and don't connect to the Grid, then you'll need lots of solar panels, a huge charge controller, a ton of Deep Cycle batteries, and a huge 220 volt AC power inverter and you'll need a licensed Electrician to install everything. All of that will be covered in the National Electric Code (NEC). Now, if you are going to do what I did, you won't need a licensed electrician. My Solar power system is EMERGENCY POWER and must be connected manually (plug it in by hand and unplug it by hand). Then it doesn't have to meet any of the NEC requirements. That doesn't mean you can go all stupid and burn your house down. My system is 4-100 watt parallel connected solar panels (22 volts DC at 5 Amps each) connected to a 20 amp charge controller, that is connected to 2-100 AH Battle Born Lithium deep cycle batteries. That is connected to a 12 VDC to 220 volt AC 5000 watt inverter plugged into a 30 Amp outlet that feeds the whole house. My system cost me about $3000. Hmmmmm..... Well, that won't last long. If you use good energy management, it will get you through the night with no problem. Convert as many lights to LED's as possible, Use Flourescent lights if you can't use LED's. If you must use Filament bulbs, use low wattage bulbs. Turn off all the circuit breakers that you don't need. When I need to go on Emergency power, I turn off the Electric hot water heater until I need hot water, Then I turn it back off when I don't need it. When the Hot water heater is on, I turn off the electric well pump. I also turn off the Electric stove and just use the Microwave or my 2 burner camp stove. The bottom line is, I can get about 12 hours of use from my batteries with no problem. Hmmmm..... What about Heat or AC? Heat is out of the question but I can use the AC. Just keep in mind that if your batteries get too weak during the night, you can connect jumper cablers from you car to the batteries and bring them back up to full charge in a pinch just by letting the car idle for about 1/2 hour. Why do I have such a small solar system? It a backup system to my gas powered Generator system. One day, I might not be able to get Gasoline. Oh, as a side note: You cannot use 2 charge controllers in parallel because one of them will see the other providing a charge and then it thinks that it doesn't need to do anything. If you want to use more panels, make sure you get a really big charge controller. By the way, my system is all 12 volt batteries in parallel. I chose 12 volts because it allows me to charge my batteries from a 12 volt source like my car.
