I’ve been wanting to play around with some solar panels and batteries for a while. I want to go small but not too small. I would like something I could possibly use in a short power outage. Maybe a few hundred watt hours. I also wanted something I could interface a Raspberry Pi to (for instance) to collect data. Mostly I just want to get a feel for how all this works, with the intention of building a complete house-wide solar and battery system.

I have decided on a Vectron controller. This seems to be a high quality product and has extensive open source support. As far as a load, I will probably buy a small refrigerator. This is about 80W but will only run intermittently. I’ll have to do a bit more shopping to figure out the panel(s) and battery(s).