Size of Solar device to use

Please i want to know what it will take to power 50 smart phones of 10W each, a standing fan of 50W and three solar bulbs of 10W each, running from 8am - 9pm daily with sunlight from 8am - 4:30pm daily.This i mean the solar panel, inverter,battery & chrage controller ratings or better still what solar generator rating can power it. thanks

Total power (let's assume this is continuous and fixed)
(50 * 10) + 50 + (3 * 10) = 580W
To do this for one full hour, you need 580Wh of energy. Let's assume you need to run this 24/7, and rely on the battery during the night. Assuming you have 5 hours of ideal sunlight conditions (this depends on your geographic location, and could be less) during which you keep the batteries topped up and run these off of solar only, then that leaves 19 hours you have to rely on battery power only. 19 * 580 = 11kWh of battery storage. If this would be a 12V battery, you'd need around 1000Ah.

The minimum solar array to charge the batteries within those 5 hours is around 2kW in ideal situations, plus an additional 600W to run the appliances.

Since ideal situations don't exist, and you can't use 100% of the battery, multiply the battery by 2 or 3 depending on the amount of days of autonomy you need in case there is no sun and a safety margin. In addition, also multiply your solar array times 2 or 3 because of the same reasons and because solar panels are cheap.

For the inverter, a small 1kW or thereabout one would do fine since you only draw around 600W. Charge controller needs to be whatever your battery can handle and take whatever solar array you end up going with.

Question to ask yourself: do all these appliances run 24/7 or only x amount of hours a day. If the latter, you can scale it accordingly. As you might see, running this 24/7 is going to need a pretty big battery pack.

FYI, Will has a video on this topic as well:

thanks so much for your swift response.
i will actually run this from 8am -9pm daily and having sunlight from 8am - 4pm daily (Africa).

A bulletproof system will have about 2000w of solar with a 10Kwh battery. You could probably "get by" with half of that. No inverter should be needed for those DC loads.

Thanks for your candid opinion. I really do appreciate

if the phones have batteries, they can probably run on internal battery most of the day, so you need minimal power, just enough to generate a 5V power supply for all phones. let's say 5V 1A for each phone, this is 250w for the time you charge the battery, about 2 hours.
since you get a lot of sun, 50A over 4 hours is only 13A on 5V, so 65Wh.
a 100W 12V panel should fit the need for the phones, and several 12V to 5V converter. Actually , here you do not even need a battery if you can use the ones from the phones.
for Fan and lights, you can take another panel , again , if you can run all DC, no need for converter.

Thanks

nosys70 said:

if the phones have batteries, they can probably run on internal battery most of the day, so you need minimal power, just enough to generate a 5V power supply for all phones. let's say 5V 1A for each phone, this is 250w for the time you charge the battery, about 2 hours.
since you get a lot of sun, 50A over 4 hours is only 13A on 5V, so 65Wh.
a 100W 12V panel should fit the need for the phones, and several 12V to 5V converter. Actually , here you do not even need a battery if you can use the ones from the phones.
for Fan and lights, you can take another panel , again , if you can run all DC, no need for converter.

Click to expand...

Thanks nosys70 for your suggestion. its really cool. but i will like to ask, what about the night hour from 6pm - 9pm, how will the fan and light work if there is no need for battery an converter.

If this is for a remote area in Africa, where supplies and logistics and the amount of time an experienced installer can be there are all concerns...doing it right the first time is usually more important than saving a couple grand in up-front costs. If none of those are concerns, than starting small and upgrading from there is possible. But if not, do it right, do it once, and you'll save money and headaches in the long run.

Many of us who live in the land of free one-day Amazon shipping, and reliable grid power, forget how easy we have it.