This project is about resilience more than energy saving, though it can also be used to save energy. Total costs should be in the order of £100, but there are ways to reduce that by getting some items from Ebay. The idea for the project came from the Transition Ipswich Energy group in 2011. It had to be targeted at a competent DIYer, and is for small scale lighting. This was originally published on TI’s website, which is no more.
This project lets you run lighting off of solar power, effectively storing sunlight for later use. It can be used at home to keep lighting during power cuts, but the same principle can be used to provide power to sheds on allotments, outbuildings or island sites without mains power. Although I have used lighting as an application, such a system can run an electric fence for much of the year if suitable solar panels and battery are used.
The system as described lets you run one or two 12V 1.8W LED lights through the year – my system was able to run mine through the winter and the shortest day where the light would be on from about 6pm to 11pm. In the summer you can also run a laptop computer power supply independently of the main for a couple of hours (these run typically 40W). That is because in the summer you get far more solar energy and you’ll probably use the lighting less.
If you want to primarily save energy or reduce your carbon footprint using solar power, this is not the solution. For that it is best to get a grid-connected solar power installation which will allow you to save energy and get renewable feed-in tariff payments. That sort of thing is on a different scale from this project, and capital costs are usually in the order of several thousand pounds, but the energy savings are much, much greater. A grid-connected solar PV system does not give you resilience against power cuts, because the anti-islanding systems in the grid tie inverter shut the system down if the main power fails, so that a PV system does not send power back into the grid when it may harm power workers trying to repair faults.