Upgrading my solar panels involved switching the house from 12 volts to 24 volts. No reasonably priced charge controllers can handle 1 KW of PV at 12 volts.

There might not be a lot of people who need to do this; entirely 12 volt offgrid houses are not super common, and most upgrades these days probably involve rooftop microinverters and so would involve a switch from DC to AC. I did not find a lot of references online for converting a whole house's voltage from 12V to 24V.

To prepare, I first checked that all the fuses and breakers were rated for > 24 volts. (Actually, > 30 volts because it will be 26 volts or so when charging.) Also, I checked for any shady wiring, and verified that all the wires I could see in the attic and wiring closet were reasonably sized (10AWG) and in good shape.

Then I:

  1. Turned off every light, unplugged every plug, pulled every fuse and flipped every breaker.
  2. Rewired the battery bank from 12V to 24V.
  3. Connected the battery bank to the new charge controller.
  4. Engaged the main breaker, and waited for anything strange.
  5. Screwed in one fuse at a time.

lighting

The house used all fluorescent lights, and they have ballasts rated for only 12V. While they work at 24V, they might blow out sooner or overheat. In fact one died this evening, and while it was flickering before, I suspect the 24V did it in. It makes sense to replace them with more efficient LED lights anyway. I found some 12-24V DC LED lights for regular screw-in (edison) light fixtures. Does not seem very common; Amazon only had a few models and they shipped from China.

Also, I ordered a 15 foot long, 300 LED strip light, which runs on 24V DC and has an adhesive backing. Great stuff -- it can be cut to different lengths and stuck anywhere. I installed some underneath the cook stove hood and the kitchen cabinets, which didn't have lights before.

Similar LED strips are used in some desktop lamps. My lamp was 12V only (barely lit at 24V), but I was able to replace its LED strip, upgrading it to 24V and three times as bright.

(Christmas lights are another option; many LED christmas lights run on 24V.)

appliances

My Lenovo laptop's power supply that I use in the house is a vehicle DC-DC converter, and is rated for 12-24V. It seems to be running fine at 26V, did not get warm even when charging the laptop up from empty.

I'm using buck converters to run various USB powered (5V) ARM boxes such as my sheevaplug. They're quarter sized, so fit anywhere, and are very efficient.

My satellite internet receiver is running with a large buck converter, feeding 12V to an inverter, feeding to a 30V DC power supply. That triple conversion is inneficient, but it works for now.

The ceiling fan runs on 24V, and does not seem to run much faster than on 12V. It may be rated for 12-24V. Can't seem to find any info about it.

The radio is a 12V car radio. I used a LM317 to run it on 24V, to avoid the RF interference a buck converter would have produced. This is a very inneficient conversion; half of the power is wasted as heat. But since I can stream internet radio all day now via satellite, I'll not use the FM radio very often.

Fridge... still running on propane for now, but I have an idea for a way to build a cold storage battery that will use excess power from the PV array, and keep a fridge at a constant 34 degrees F. Next home improvement project in the queue.