Start Here

If you’re new to electricity you should first read our “Electricity Basics” page. It will give you an intuitive understanding of terms like voltage , amperage and watts in plain English. There is a lot of miss-information and confusion out there on the web, so you might want to glance at this even if you’re not a newbie.

Do you know What’s Watt?

There is so much confusion out there mixing up watts and watt-hours, even on professional solar power websites.  Review our What’s Watt? page to make sure you understand the difference before buying parts or designing a solar power system.

Once you know the basics

• You can educate yourself further by reading all the articles under the Self-Help menu heading. (These articles also appear in the right hand column on most pages on this site.)
• Our “Reference Library” page has other in-depth material you can download or read online to educate yourself.
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• Our Blog section is designed to inform you and also inspire you on how the right equipment can help move your project forward.
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• Our Store section only lists items we’re comfortable recommending. We don’t care if you purchase through us or elsewhere. It’s there to help you find items that will last, but won’t break the bank. We can also purchase and ship to you most any electrical item you can think of.
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• We recommend folks living or working in off-grid situations join the Low Power and Mobile Computing Google group (an SIL moderated open email list). You can ask questions and benefit from the experience of others.

Online Tools to Help you

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 presets for our packaged systems, or click the “advanced” button to override and simulate any size system. Here’s a walk-through on how to use the online test drive tool.

Our unique Solar Insolation Lookup Tool (SILT) predicts power output from a solar panel for any location in the world. It provides more specific information than the World Bank’s Global Solar Atlas which only gives annual averages. 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 predict for that. For detailed help using the SILT tool, see the SILT Help file.

Need Personalized Help? – We’re here for you.

The GTIS engineering team is here to help SIL, Wycliffe, and Global Partners keep their computers, lights and other equipment running so they can accomplish the work God has called them to do. We are based on the JAARS campus in the eastern USA. If you need our help, either remotely or in person, see the Expert Technical Advice page for how to engage our services.