Electricity is the movement of electrons through a conducting material, in our case wire. The easiest way to visualize this is to imagine that electricity is water going through a pipe; if your flow of water in a pipe is high enough, you can do useful work. The same thing applies to electricity. Electricity is measured in amperes, volts and watts. Voltage can be thought of as the pressure of the electrons going through the wire. Amperage is the overall flow rate of electricity through the wire - low voltage, high amperage could be thought of as a low pressure water main, while high voltage, low amperage could be thought of as a high pressure water hose.
Wattage is how much force you get from the system, in terms of voltage times amperage over time; you can have low amperage, high voltage system and a low voltage, high amperage system both channel the same amount of Watts. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts, and your electrical bill will be in kilowatt-hours, where an hour is broken down into seconds (3,600 seconds to the hour).
Electrical current comes in two varieties: Alternating Current (AC) and Direct Current (DC). Most everything in your home uses AC current, and that's what your electrical utility company provides; AC provides some significant efficiencies when transmitting power, and is less of a fire hazard and is generally safer. DC is more efficient over shorter distances., but requires heavier wiring and insulation.
DC power is converted to AC power through a system called an "inverter". The inverter will cause some power loss when current is cycled through it; if you've ever noticed how warm a laptop's power supply gets when it's been running, you've run into the kind of power loss we're talking about, and for most of your electrical devices, you're going to want AC power as the final input.
The trade off becomes mapping the power lost through the inverter, versus the expense of running heavier wiring to reduce resistance losses on DC power transmission, and when and where the power will be used. There is no generalized answer to this, each solution will be unique depending on your appliances, how much battery capacity you have, and your transmission distances.
See the list to the right for complete information about how to build your own solar-powered system.
