Components

Common Components of a Home Solar Electric System:

• Solar panels or modules - These generate 12V electricity from sunlight. Batteries - These store your electricity for future use.
• Controller - This regulates the power to and from your batteries.
• Inverter - This transforms low voltage direct current power to high voltage alternating current power.
• Monitors, Gauges, Meters, etc. - These keep you aware of the status of your system and the individual components.
• Wire - Connects the various components of the system to each other and to the loads. Fuses, Breakers, Switches, and
• Disconnects - Gives you overload and short circuit protection, and allows you to isolate all or part of your system for safety and maintenance reasons.
• Battery Charger - This allows you to charge you batteries from auxiliary sources.
• Generator - This provides back up power to your system and charges your batteries when necessary; mostly for rural installations.
• Smart metering technology – this tells you how much each appliance is using in real time, and many utility companies are providing these kits to residential customers. They're also part and parcel with net-electric metering, where you sell excess power generated back to the grid (and it shows up as a discount on your next electric bill.)

Your solar electric system is, nearly by necessity, going to be a custom job made up of these components. It will need to factor in what you need for power generation and storage, and other site specific locations (like needing a facing that gets a lot of sunlight, problems with nearby trees and more). While there are complete "off the shelf" systems, these are typically for RVs, boats and at most, small cabins; trying to tie them to your house will swamp them.

During the design process, you're going to be balancing initial purchase cost, versus your energy needs (both total volume and when it's needed), versus how much battery storage you can get, and how much you want to spend for future expandability.