How Many Solar Panels for a 3kva System
How many solar panels do you need for a 3Kva system? It’s a question that we recently found ourselves asking. With South Africans turning to solar to avoid the blackout blues, you are too are likely to find yourself asking this question at some point in time.
In our case, we have a 3Kva system at home. The system works fairly well. It has a 200 AH 24 volt battery. The challenge that we encountered was that they system was designed to be grid tied. At night, the batteries were supposed to be charged using power from Eskom.
Meanwhile, during the day, solar panels would charge the battery while also providing power to appliances. As a result of this setup, we didn’t initially think we needed that many solar panels. As a result, we got 4 panels of 370 Watts each.
Things worked well, till we decided to go entirely off-grid. Then we realized the panels that we have bought were not enough. We needed to get additional ones. That’s how we happened to end up asking “how many solar panels are needed for a 3Kva system?”
Number of panels for a 3000 watt solar system
The table below shows the number of solar panels that are needed for a 3Kva system. As you can see, the number depends on the size of the panels. The bigger the wattage on your solar panels, the fewer you are going to need;
| Panel Size | Number of panels required |
|---|---|
| 300 watts | 10 |
| 320 watts | 9 |
| 350 watts | 8 |
| 400 watts | 7 |
| 500 watts | 6 |
| 600 watts | 5 |
Explanation
That’s the answer to the question, how many solar panels do I need for a 3Kva system. We noted in the above section that the number depends on the size of your panels.
If you get bigger panels, you will need fewer when setting up this type of system. Meanwhile, if you get smaller panels, you will need many more.
In our case, we have 370 watt panes. So, we will need to buy an additional 4 to get up to speed in the completely off grid setup.
If you are wondering how we arrived at the above figures, here is how to calculate the number of panels needed for a solar system. The calculations to be made are pretty simple.
It’s better to buy panels at once
One thing that we need to note here is that we made a mistake when setting up our system. We didn’t buy all the necessary solar panels in one go. But why is it important to do so?
Well, fact is, you are going to have a hard time finding the same brand and same size solar panels when it comes to upgrading. The result is that you could end up having to mix different solar panel sizes.
Is that a bad thing? We answer that in the article in the provided link. The simple answer that we can give here is that mixing reduces the performance of your biggest panels.
So, if you mix one with 300 watts with another with 500 watts, it means the 500 watt panel will be forced to perform at 300 watts. That represents something of a loss in terms of the energy that you are able to produce from your investment.
Summary
In this article, we answered the question how many solar panels are needed for a 3Kva system. It was noted that the number needed ranges from 5 to 10, depending on the size of your panels. Working with the fact that 340 watt panels are the most popular, you need about 8 panels when setting up your system.