- Do your panels integrate with the house?
In my case, I have discrete panels on my roof. Some of these panels were purchased used, and some originally date from the 80’s (old Arco Panels) but still produce good power. I am not a builder, but had an interest in solar, so I did what I could easily do to my older flat roof. I suspect that with standard, well made panel construction some of the mono-crystaline and multicrystaline panels could last pretty near fifty years. Currently, many are warranted for 25 years.

-Do you have batteries? A generator? DC appliances?
In my system, I do not have a large storage component, I have a 110 Farad ultra-capacitor bank which can charge to 60 Volts on the nominal 48V system, which only stores about 40 Watt hours of usable energy. It is really more of a buffer than storage. I do not have a generator. For the main system, I have a 4000 Watt Trace (now Xantrex) inverter which runs in LBX mode which means that a connected lighting circuit is powered by Solar when the voltage of the capacitor bank is up (daytime), or grid power at night when there is no solar power. In the winter, I dump any surplus into heat, and this is controlled by the banks voltage. For the summer, the charge controller, a Trace C40 disconnects the solar panels at about 60V, although I am thinking about adding a hot water pre-heating tank to take advantage of the excesses in power I could generate. I have a couple of electrical outlets wired off of the inverter, so on a sunny day I can switch my washer and dryer (gas) over to those outlets to use a bit of the surplus. Aside from the laundry, this is all automated, and basically, the utilization of energy increases as the voltage increases, and if the usage can’t keep up with the generation, then the solar input is toggled off by the controller. I do use some DC lighting in my Laundry room but that pulls from a separate 12V system which is charged from separate panels through a Trace C12 charge and lighting controller and has 225 amp hours of battery storage in flooded lead acid batteries.

-Do you have an idea of the usable power you are generating?
I actually tracked the daily charge into the Capacitor Bank in February and into March of this year via an amp hour meter on the charge controller. It ranged from just over a quarter of a KiloWatt hour on a dark and snowy/rainy days to over 8 KWh/day in sunny weather. It was interesting to plot the general increase in energy collected as the days lengthened. When it got warm out, the heat was no longer needed, and my usage, and as a result, my generation both dropped.

My system is not that large, or efficient, compared to what could be done, but it is an interesting hobby for me.