Solar panels for summerhouse

Castled

Hi, looking for advice on using small solar power system for my summerhouse,  for heating. Anyone any experience of this?  Tia

Niv

When do you need heating most? Winter.
When do you get most solar generation? Summer

I would say this is a bit of a non starter really, I cant see how you would make it worthwhile.

If you wanted it to power a laptop and a light for example then maybe, but heater, pretty unlikely to be of much use I would say.

Grenage

I assume that if the load was resistive and could work at any input, and the summer house was well insulated, it could work.

Would it be cost effective? Probably not.

Castled

I'm not looking to heat it to a high temperature merely take the chill from it  

CSI_Yorkshire

So decide how big a heater you would need to take the chill off, and look at its power (W).

In the shortest months, you will get about 1 hours worth of peak power out of your solar.  If you had batteries to store it all, then how long would you want to spread out that hours worth over?  4 hours?  12 hours?

To know how many solar panels you would need - take the power of the heater and multiply by the number of hours you want to run it for.  That will estimate the total power of panels.  A big panel (like on a house roof) is 400 or 500W ish.

It's simpler (of course) if you only want to turn the heater on when the sun is strong enough, but that's not very often and you probably wouldn't like only having the chill taken off between 12-2pm. 

Rosa_Damascena

Niv said:

When do you need heating most? Winter.
When do you get most solar generation? Summer

I would say this is a bit of a non starter really, I cant see how you would make it worthwhile.

If you wanted it to power a laptop and a light for example then maybe, but heater, pretty unlikely to be of much use I would say.

I wouldn't be so sure of this. The other day I saw a harbour side coffee trader that was part-powering her coffee cart by mobile solar panels. It crossed my mind to take a picture as I've never seen such a thing before (and was impressed), but I didn't want to be intrusive or feel compelled to shell out on a coffee.

It looked similar to this:

chris_n

I have 4kW of panels on my house roof, almost due south. In winter they are often producing less than 400W all day, which could be a maximum of 6 hours long. You aren't going to get anywhere near enough on a shed roof to give any worthwhile heat.

ThisIsWeird

The simplest way would be to have it charging up a small storage rad - an 850W jobbie, most likely - which you may quite possibly pick up on FB for next to now't. But I guess that will still require a 'proper' PV system with an inverter.
'Chill'? Just about.