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I've been working on this for a long time and I finally got my solar power system all set up and functioning. I ended up designing it myself mostly because I couldn't find anyone that was willing to do much more than just sell me a package. I made the mistake of buying my Solar Panels back in 2007 when I first started thinking about this. That turned out to be a HUGE mistake because the price of PVs has dropped considerably since then. If I had waited until this year to buy them I would have paid 1/4 of what I did back then.

The good news is I found a 2000 Watt Pure-Sign Wave inverter on Amazon for only $340 bucks.

Anyway, I've never seen any kind of guide that would tell you the proper ratio between you PV watt size and your battery KWh size. I ended up with only 250 watts of PV and 5.4 kWh for a battery bank. In my case, I often only use the cabin on weekends so there is a long time for recovery. That's why I figured I could get away with this particular ratio. But some of the cabin kits I saw had even worse ratios than that.

I went with a 24v system because (1) I don't really have any need for any 12V DC takeoffs, and (2) doubling the voltage allowed me to use smaller wiring.

I got a 2000 Watt inverter even though my lighting load is pretty small. Maybe 300 watts total. But my occasional loads, a circular saw, a hair dryer, a vacuum cleaner or a waffle iron should run without an issue there. The inverter eats up about 50 watts of power just being on and maybe a smaller one would consume less. I'm not all that familiar with inverters. Maybe that's a big energy debt to pay for the small amount of power I actually need?

My charge controller can handle another 500 watts of PV if I want to add them later. But I'm just going to see how well this works first before I start to tinker.

Anyway, anybody want to critique my design, feel free.

Paul