Pardon the stock image. It won’t let me post without one. Curious if anyone here has built or researched a diy balcony solar setup. I’m new to solar, so this seems like a good small scale project to learn on.
If you have built one, what equipment did you use? How did you decide on panel wattage?
In germany we have laws allowing up to 2kWp panels and 800W inverter output to be simply plugged to the grid. All you need is an empty plug socket. Whatever you use yourself inside your home is free, reducing your demand and lowering your costs. Everything more will be feed into the public grid but you cant sell it. If you want to sell it, laws and regulations are more strict making it usually too expensive for such small systems.
So for example your photovoltaic system produces 300W for about an hour and you have your fridge (100W), TV (50W) and a phone charger (10W) running. 160W you use yourself, 140W go into the public grid. You lowered your energy bill by 0,16kWh during this one hour.
So building balcony solar is limited by this but for sure also by your available space. My balcony is small, thats why I only had space for one single panel with 500Wp. Simple decision.