Home solar panels generate electricity from sunlight. But there’s an extra step needed before you can use that electricity to power your heat pump. Solar inverters make electricity from solar panels usable for everything in your house. The reason your home can’t use electricity straight from your solar panels and the history of inverters goes back to late-19th century America. Here are the basics of what inverters do and why every solar system has an inverter in it.
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What Is a Solar Inverter?
A solar power inverter changes the direct current (DC) electricity created by solar panels into the alternating current (AC) electricity your house uses.
Imagine an electric wire is like a tube filled with air. DC is like blowing air into one side of the tube, while AC is like breathing in and out into the tube. DC electricity flows in one direction, but AC electricity flows back and forth.
Changing electricity from DC to AC is done by the solar panel inverter, which lets you use solar energy to power your home.
How Does a Solar Inverter Work?
A solar inverter helps your solar panels and your house talk to each other.
- The solar panels send DC electricity to the inverter.
- The inverter changes the electricity from DC into AC.
- The inverter sends the AC electricity to the electrical panel so it can be shared around the house.
The actual change from DC to AC is done by transistors, which are like very fast switches. By turning those switches on and off in a specific pattern, you can change the direction the electricity flows.
This process sounds simple, but it might be the most important work your home solar panel system does.
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Why Can’t My House Use Direct Current?
Around 140 years ago, there was a big competition between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla to decide if homes would use DC or AC electricity. This is now known as the “War of the Currents.”
Edison had developed DC and, in the early years of electric power systems, that was the standard for U.S. homes. The only problem was it’s hard to change the voltage of DC (voltage is like the pressure of electricity) which is important for sending power over long distances.
That changed with the invention of the transformer, which is basically a box of iron with wires wrapped around it. A transformer allows electricity to be changed from high voltage to low voltage, or from low voltage to high voltage.
Low voltage is much safer to use in the home, so the transformer allowed high voltage power to be sent over long distances, and then changed into low voltage power to use in the home. As a result, AC electricity, popularized by Westinghouse and Tesla, ultimately became the standard used in all American homes.
What Else Can a Solar Inverter Do?
A solar power inverter can do other important tasks based on what your home’s solar panel system needs:
- It can control the flow of electricity to and from your solar batteries.
- It manages how your home shares electricity with the electricity grid.
- It stops your solar panels from sending power to the grid during a power outage.
Why Do I Need a Solar Inverter?
It’s pretty simple: You can’t use the solar energy from your solar panels without a solar inverter. Whether you install one solar panel on a garage yourself, or pay a solar company to install an array of solar panels to power your entire home, you need at least one solar panel inverter.
Ready to see how much you could save by going solar? Check out Palmetto’s solar savings calculator tool.
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Andrew GiermakWriter and EditorAndrew joined Palmetto in Charlotte in August 2024. He’s been a writer in journalism, then in business, going back to almost the 20th century. He’s lived in Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Virginia again, and now North Carolina for the last 12 years. He likes golf. Is he good at it? Not so much.
