Technicians

Help is available

Have you been tasked with installing or maintaining a generator, UPS system or solar power system and wish you had a little more training or experience? Are you pretty good with electricity but never done solar?

To help you learn we have a Self-Help section and our blog section contains examples and product reviews.

Technical Design and Simulation for Solar Power Systems

We have a whole section of this website which will walk you through all the design considerations for an off-grid solar power system of any size. We also have tools to help you predict the performance of solar power systems.

Our “Online Test Drive” tool simulates hour-by-hour performance of any sized solar power system with loads and weather conditions that you can set. Evaluate if your panels and batteries are adequate for different loads. Use the “advanced” button to override the cookie-cutter presets for our pre-packaged systems.

Our Solar Insolation Lookup Tool tool (SILT) predicts power output from a solar panel for any location. It provides more specific information than the World Bank’s Global Solar Atlas which gives annual averages only. SILT uses NASA data to give you month-by-month predictions of solar output from your panels. When living off-grid you don’t care so much about average yearly output, but need to know how much energy you’ll have during that cloudy time of the year. SILT will tell you that. Plus you can align you panels an any orientation you choose and SILT will also account for that.

Our engineering team is here to help you. You can order specialized hardware,  get expert advice, or a get second opinion by contacting us:

• Email us at power_systems@sil.org
• Call us at: +1 (704) 843-6531
• Hours: Monday-Thursday: 8am-5pm EST, Friday 8am-12pm EST

For large projects we might be able to send a team member to help you install equipment.