Sunlight hits a panel, the panel makes DC electricity, an inverter turns it into the AC your house runs on, and whatever you do not use runs your meter backward. That is solar, start to finish. Everything else is detail.
Here is the ten-minute version, the part that makes the rest of this site make sense.
The four parts
Name them and the whole thing stops being mysterious. A solar setup is four things:
- Panels sit on the roof or a ground rack and make power whenever the sun hits them. More panels, more power. They are rated in watts, so eighteen 400W panels is a 7.2kW array.
- The inverter is the brain. Panels make direct current (DC), your house and the grid run on alternating current (AC), and the inverter translates one to the other. It also decides where the power goes: into the house, into a battery, or out to the grid. A hybrid inverter can run a battery. A plain grid-tie inverter cannot.
- A battery is optional. It stores the power your panels make at noon so you can run the house on it after dark, or keep the lights on when the grid goes down. Without one, a grid-tied system shuts off during an outage for safety. Panels by themselves do not power your house in a blackout. The battery is what does that.
- The meter belongs to the utility, and a solar house gets a bidirectional one that counts power flowing out as well as in. That counting is what pays you back.
Where the power goes
Follow one sunny afternoon. The array makes 5kW, the house is using 600W, and the other 4.4kW has to go somewhere:
- Battery not full? The surplus charges it.
- Battery full, or no battery? The surplus flows to the grid and your meter logs a credit.
- Sun down? The house runs off the battery first, then pulls from the grid like any other house.
Make more than you need in the day, store it or bank it, spend it back at night. That is the whole rhythm.
The three ways to wire it
Picking one is the first real decision:
- Grid-tied is the simplest and cheapest. Panels, an inverter, the grid, no battery. It shaves your bill, and it shuts off in an outage.
- Hybrid adds a battery to a grid-tied system. You keep the grid as backup, but a blackout no longer takes your house down with it. This is what most of our customers want.
- Off-grid has no utility at all. The battery and panels carry the house alone, so the bank gets big and the design gets serious. Right for a remote cabin, overkill for a house with a power line at the road.
The battery is the dividing line between the three, and it is where most of the money goes.
What it costs, in one honest sentence
An array is cheap per watt and getting cheaper. Storage is where the budget goes, and how much house you want to back up during an outage swings the number more than anything else. We do not print prices on a page like this because they move every week. The system builder has today's number, sized to your actual power bill, with every part swappable before you buy.
Who does the install
You have room to choose here too:
- Do it yourself. Buy the kit and handle the whole job.
- Split it. Do the parts you are comfortable with and hand off the rest.
- Have it managed. A licensed contractor does the electrical work and we run the project end to end, so the pieces land in order and it passes inspection.
The ten-minute version is this: panels make power, an inverter turns it into house power, a battery stores it for night and outages, and the meter counts what you send back. Read the next two guides in order and you can judge any quote someone hands you.
Ready to see real numbers for your roof? Start with the estimate. It takes your address and your bill and gives you a size to build from.