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?

Balcony solar that is grid tied is probably not something you want to DIY. The amount of power you can generate probably wouldnt be worth the hoops you'd need to jump through. That's not including using the smart inverters that plug in (cause that's not really "diy").

Off grid balcony solar isnt super hard. If you have an all-in-one charge controller/battery/inverter (jackery, goal zero, and a million others), you just plug the panels right into it, and you can pull power out the other side with no trouble. That's also debatably "diy". Getting a little more advanced than that still isnt too hard.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-system/

Personally, I have a goalzero power station and 300W of panels. I wish I had done a little more research before buying the goalzero, cause I probably would have gone a different route (LFP battery, not NMC) because I care way more about charge cycles than energy density.

You should be able to post without an image. The option to upload an image or add a thumbnail will be present anytime you wish to post, but you can leave them blank for a text-only post, which only requires a title (technically you can even leave the Body part blank).

Thanks! That site is super helpful.

It seems like most of the balcony solar-like set ups would be more pre-made than I'm after. Really I just want a little project that I can learn about solar on and gives me something useful at the end of it. Maybe a direct drive attic vent fan would be more my speed at this point. I'm also open to other ideas if someone has a good beginner project.

Good to know. I'm not really sure what happened there. The post button was grayed out until I added an image. Next time I'll try to back out of the post and restart.

Having battery storage is the most expensive part of any off-grid system. Without it, you obviously dont need batteries, but you can also get rid of all the battery management stuff, charge controlling, inverters, etc.

Direct attic fan sounds great because you need it the most when it's the most sunny.

It would be cool to do a direct solar powered hydroponics or pond project, where you just pump all the water to a reservoir when you have sun, and let it drain back 24 hours a day.

I figure batteries are their own thing and useful on their own. Technically if the panels provide the minimum your unit uses for fridge and such non is needed but batteries to me is about having blackouts and being able to still function as normal for enough time to get it sorted. Granted that can be a long time but like an hour can cover the majority of outages and as it gets longer you get more but its sorta one of those things where the longer it is the less often its going to come into play but then you have where if the panels get you more than you need then you can pay less at night to. For awhile anyway.

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.