How to Wire Solar Panel to 120-230V AC Load and Inverter?

Electrical Technology

Wiring PV Panel to UPS-Inverter, 12V Battery and 120-230V AC Load

In this very basic solar panel wiring installation tutorial, we will show how to connect a solar panel to the AC load through UPS/Inverter, charge controller. You will also know how to connect the PV panel to the battery and direct DC load as well.

We have used a single unit system i.e. an 120W, 12V solar panel, 100Ah, 12V battery and 120/230V Automatic UPS for auto ON/OFF operation of the system. You will need all the four basic components of a solar panel installation system e.g. PV panel, solar charge controller (PWM or MPPT), battery and an inverter.

The PV panel wiring can be used for both AC & DC loads. AC load can be powered by UPS/Inverter where it uses the storage energy in the battery as backup power. It can also be used without the battery if you don’t need the backup (stored) power later at night or shading. This way, the solar panels will direct power up the AC load via Online UPS. In addition, the DC load can be directly connected to the charge controller (only DC load terminals).

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The following solar panel wiring diagram shows that an 120W, 12V solar panel is directly connected to the 12V charge controller. Battery and inverter are connected to the battery terminals (Positive & Negative) of the charge controller. DC load is also connected to the DC output terminal of the charge controller. The 120V or 230V AC load (i.e. fan and lights etc) is connected to the UPS output terminals.

The whole system can light up both AC and DC loads at the same time. Keep in mind that use the rated and well designed system according to your needs as you know that a single PV panel and battery won’t support that much load. In addition, The charging time and rate of the battery will be too low due to other loads connected to the PV panel at once. To avoid the overload conditions. you will have to connect multiple units (solar panels and batteries) in series, parallel or combination of series and parallel connection depends on your system requirements.

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For this reason, you will have to find how much wattage solar panel do you need and what is the required amount of backup power stored by later for later use etc. We have covered up all the details in previous posts (links added in this post for more explanation).

The good thing is that all the power changing process (from solar power to battery and vice versa) is fully automatic due to automatic UPS wiring and you don’t need to use an extra manual or automatic changeover or auto transfer switch to transfer the power between batteries and solar panels to the load points.

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