Just had a very nice 12 x 16 shed delivered to my new house. I don't want to pay (or trench the yard) to have power run to it (which I would have/should have done before I had the pad built anyway), and I was going to be content to have a couple of battery or solar LED units outside the doors for general security and access purposes and some stick-up battery powered LED units inside for illumination while putting stuff in/out in the dark.

Then I got thinking (always dangerous)... did some research... and now I'm looking at Grape Solar kits.

Question is what wattage do I need to run a handful of LED lights (not much, I know), but perhaps also a couple of small exhaust fans at the gable vents and maybe even wire an outlet for light duty use if I ever need to plug something in. Not looking to run appliances or even A/C. This is a storage shed, not a workshop.

Grape's kit options available at HomeDepot are 540, 300, 200, and 100. I'd rather buy big and regret nothing later, but the 540 kit is $645 and the 300 kit is only $355. Probably going to be one of those two. The kits don't include a 12v battery or inverter.

What do we think?

-Rob

You might be overthinking this a bit, especially if lighting is your primary concern. Start with something like this.

https://www.amazon.com/KK-BOL-...21-8624-135149aa9081

If you need more lights, you can get multi-light kits.

A 100W-equivalent LED bulb will use ~15W
As BBMW said, if your only concern is lighting, I'd use lights with built in panels & batteries, much cheaper.

If you are dead set on getting one of those kits, the smaller 150W & the smallest 12V deep-cycle you can find will probably be plenty for what you describe (2x dusk-to-dawn lights/low wattage + 2x 100W equivalent used inside ~3hr/day)

You need to figure this backwards, so to speak.

First, determine what all you'd like to have, lights fans etc. Then add up the watts they will consume over 24 hours. This is Demand.

Will this all be 12 volt? Any 110 volt devices to power?

Then you'll need to figure out how much battery power you'll need to have available to power this demand, day and night.

As for batteries, you should NEVER let them run below their safety rating, for example if you use traditional golf cart batteries to power your devices, if they get discharged below, I can't recall exactly right this second, but if they get below a 55% level it WILL RUIN THEM. BTW tradtional golf cart batteries are an excellent and dependable supply, cheap, easy to find, everybody understands them quickly. The new Lithium batteries can be safely discharged down to 10% and be just fine.

The battery capacity is the most critical item to figure for your solar system.

Once you have that figured out then you can look at solar panels and figure out how much solar wattage you'll need to supply the batteries to supply your devices.

BTW solar panels don't normally supply their rated power. For example, a 100 watt panel will seldom deliver 100 watts power. Latitude above the equator, time of year and hours of sunlight, clouds, and dirt on the panels reduces output.

There are inefficiencies to allow for, so allow for that.

This should give you a good map to follow, so to speak.

I plan on getting a solar powered setup for my ham radio equipment.

There are many brands and the Renogy brand is hard to beat. You can buy a "kit" of Renogy panels, wiring, controller and charger, shunt meter to monitor, etc, for not a lot of money.

Good luck to you.

EDIT to add: If you want to have a 110 volt outlet, and that would be seldom to rarely, it might be easier, simpler and definitely cheaper to forget that, just drag out the extension cord from wherever you have commercially supplied 110 volt power.
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^^^ OKCGene has some good advise.
Forget any 110 V outlets as that will require quite a large array, many batteries etc and it will be easier to just trench a line from your house.

I have a 200 watt set up in my truck camper that, along with my truck charging my battery when running has been fine so far on our summer long trip.

I would suggest using only 12 volt lights etc. and a pair of 6 volt golf cart batteries, a solar controller and one of the smaller units you listed.

My panels are Renogy and are very good but they are more expensive.