Solar power is an ideal solution for bringing electricity to a shed, outhouse or stable. The cost of safely running a mains extension circuit from your house to the shed can run to hundreds of pounds, which is a bit excessive if you just want to be able to see where your tools are in the dark. 

So the basic idea is that a small solar photo voltaic panel is mounted somewhere on the shed to maximise the amount of solar energy falling on it (usually on the roof).  This is then connected up to a standard 12v battery (such as one from a car) so that it will trickle-charge up the battery during daylight hours.

Then, come evening, you will have a ready solar-charged battery sitting there that should be enough to run a light or two for as long as you're likely to need it.

We've got a range of SolarMate solar panel shed kits, from ones to run a single bulb (all bits included in the kit), right up to ones for running a laptop or PC. Visit our online shop to find out more: SolarMate solar power kits for your shed. We've also got a little solar lighting case study that follows us installing one of these kits recently on a big shed. 

solarmates indoors

We've been wondering recently, what other applications could there be for a SolarMate lighting system apart from a shed or stable? The obvious, and appealing idea is to think about powering internal lights from solar power.

It just so happens that in our office, we've got some cheapo IKEA spot lights that run on off a 12V plug in transformer.

They're the kind that clip across two parallel wires, and have those little halogen bulbs. Anyway, it seems kind of daft to have the whacking great mains transformer humming away (and no doubt wasting loads of energy), when we could find a better way of running them.

Enter the SolarMate II. We reckon the 10W, high-efficiency solar panel included in the kit should be enough to keep a car battery charged enough to run a few of these lights every evening when we're working late in the better generation office.

We connected up the panel to the wiring as per the kit's instructions, which was all fairly straightforward. Then Toby went off and scrounged a second hand car battery from a car repair shop around the corner (why pay £50 at Halfords when you can get one for free?). If you do this, best take a voltmeter to check it isn't completely dud before you lug it home. Ours was at 12.6V, which seemed reasonable enough.

setting up the solar panel

First we thought about putting the panel on the inside of our office windows. They are slanted (a good start), but are mainly north-facing (not so good). So instead we climbed up on the flat roof and found a good angle to position the panel. Ideally, we should mount it properly with the screws and everything, like in the instructions, but well, we'll get around to that soon...

The wire from the panel drops down the side of the building and in through our office window. This is connected to our car battery. In daylight (but not sunlight), the panel produced 0.01 Amps at 12v (so that's 0.1 Watts). Once we took it up to the roof in the weak November sunshine, we were getting 0.5 Amps at 12v (which is about 6 Watts). We should get up to 10 Watts in summer when the sun is stronger and more directly overhead.

It's a bit of a Heath Robinson setup, but it works great - we now have half of the lights in the office on solar power!

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