Quantum Power Conversions (P) Ltd, Bangalore, India | sales@qpcpower.com | www.qpcpower.com

Current Trends in application of solar Power Conditioning Units

With the increasing awareness on energy saving and ecology consciousness, more and more users are going in for roof top off grid solar energy generation solution for their homes.

In the past, customers buying solar power conditioning units (PCU) or Solar Inverter would simply connect it to the existing building just like he would connect any ordinary inverter

Not much thought was given to the power consumption and efficiency of the electrical appliances already installed in the building.

Conventional electrical appliances like fluorescent lights, incandescent bulbs, fans etc are of low efficiency and so would consume more energy.

The solar panel is the one which generates energy from the Sun. This is also the costliest component in any Solar PCU installation. The energy so generated by thus gets wasted in these appliances of poor efficiency.

Of late energy conscious users have started to replace the old lamps and fans with LED tubes, LED bulbs, BLDC fans etc.

While this brings down the total energy consumption, it also introduces new problems

All LED lamps and BLDC fans have electronic circuit which first rectifies the ac supply into direct current (DC) and then is further used to drive the LED or fan. These converters have large capacitors for filtering the rectified ac voltage. Though the standards specify Power Factor Correction (PFC) at the input, most LED lamps especially the low cost ones, do not have any such provisions.

Therefore, these appliances:

1. Draw high surge currents from the source to charge the bulk capacitors when switched ON.

2. Draw high peak currents at the line frequency on to the PCU every ac cycle.

The net result is that, the total such appliances that can be connected get restricted.

The Quantum Solar PCU has overcome this by ensuring high cyclic current rating of their PCU.

It has very short transfer time when the loads get switched between grid supply and inverter. Thereby ensuring that the input capacitor does not discharge and so the surge demand is minimized.

The other factor to consider is that due to the low power consumption, and large size of the solar panels the PCU goes into solar mode very early in the day. This puts high demand on the solar charger technology as in most of the daytime, the PCU is in battery mode with the solar charger supporting it.

Quantum Power Conversions (P) Ltd, Bangalore, India | sales@qpcpower.com | www.qpcpower.com

Older technology chargers which are basically voltage control types are strictly not acceptable in such scenario. Here the batteries go into continuous cycle of charge and discharge in the day severely affecting its life.

The Solar charger in the Quantum PCU is a constant current – constant Voltage boost cum float charger. This technique ensures that the batteries initially charged at constant current then it is maintained at constant boost voltage till its specific gravity is restored. After this, it maintains constant voltage at float level. Moreover, every 30 days, it conducts a equalizing charge cycle on the battery.

All these lead to long battery life.

When selecting a solar PCU, many buyers do not go into all these issues. These are basically internal factors which are not known to the buyer.

At Quantum, the philosophy is to maximize the value customer derives out of his investment. We listen to the customer, search the trend in the market, debate internally and our continuous improvement process ensures true value.