i was wondering if i could take one of those cheap solar panals that you can power you car battery with, and somehow hook it up to a microwave, or coffee maker or something like that?

Is there any other easier way to do this.

The whole goal is to not use electricity.

Best answer:

Answer by Sigi H
Sure you can use a solar panel and dump the output into a bank of 12V batteries as an example. However, you need an inverter which converts the 12DC into 120VAC so you can run your toaster. The cheaper/cheapest inverters give you a simple (bipolar) square wave. using a switching transformer. Then there are the ones who have a stepped waveform (4 steps being the minimum with a distinct zero portion) and the very expensive ones deliver a sine wave. The latter is basically a DC amplifier with a 60Hz sine oscillator driving the power section. The sine wave can also be derived from a digitized signal with various numbers of steps.

EDIT: I assumed that anyone using an inverter knows that one can not power a 500W microwave with a 100W inverter.

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