This paper presents a theoretical and practical study of a single phase photovoltaic conversion system. It consists of a step down converter to charge a battery with the maximum power available from photovoltaic generator (PVG) and a single phase voltage source inverter (VSI) to produce a stable AC voltage (220 V/50 Hz) with lower total harmonic distortion (THD). A new perturb and observe algorithm is designed and implemented in a cheaper microcontroller PIC 16F876 where the duty cycle perturbation and the sampling period are selected to insure the stability of the PV system around the maximum power. The control strategy adopted for the inverter is the Selective Harmonic Eliminated Pulse Width Modulation (SHE PWM). The pulses are calculated and transferred on the PIC 16F876 memory. With this technique, inverter losses are decreased and the output voltage is easily filtered with a simple low pass filter producing a perfectly sine wave form voltage. The battery is sized to supply loads in non-sunny times. With optimization of its various components, the conventional single phase PV system has a low cost, high efficiency but also good power quality which represents a good opportunity to use it in many stand alone photovoltaic applications such as houses lighting. An experimental system has been made to demonstrate the efficiency of the photovoltaic system and to validate simulations done by Matlab-Simulink environment. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.