How To Calculate Your Solar Power Needs And Costs

With green living becoming more and more important, many people are starting to install home solar power to supplement their power, and reduce their electric expenses.

But when you install solar power, how much do you actually have to generate to say cut your bills by 50%? And what kind of costs will you be looking at?

This is the process we followed, when calculating our home’s solar power needs and the investment required.

1 - What Is Your Daily Power Consumption?:

To work out how much power you use on an average daily basis, this is what you have to do: First go back and look at your past 12 months electricity bills. Then work out the average kilowatt hours (kWh) used per month. The reason we do this is because we use different amounts of power throughout the year. The calculation is month 1 + month 2 + month 3 etc… then divide that by 12. If you do not have all the statements, just use last month’s bill.

Now take your average monthly usage and divide it by 30 to work out your average daily power consumption

- Here is an example: Lets say the power used last month was 800 kWh. Your average daily usage would be 800/30 = 26.7 kWh per day.

- Now if you want to only halve your power bill then you need to produce 26.7 / 2 = 13.4 kWh of solar panel watt power per day.

2 - Work Out Your Solar Panel Watt Requirements:

To do this, you first need to determine how many usable hours of sunlight your area receives per day. This is where a solar insolation map comes in handy - you can view one from our original article on our website.

Your next step is to take the daily kilowatt hours needed and divide it by the average usable sunlight hours, then multiply that by 1.25 (this is used to take into account the inefficiencies in the solar power system from wiring, charge controllers, batteries, and inverters).

- From our same example, if we lived in California where it gets on average 5.5 hours of usable sunlight per day, the solar panel watt requirements are:

13.4 kWh / 5.5hrs x 1.25 = 3.045 kW or 3045 Watts per day.

This means we need solar panels with the capacity to produce at least 3045 Watts of power.

3 - The Cost Of The Panels:

Now you you need to calculate how much these solar panels will cost you. At the moment $4.85 per Watt is the highest average cost in the United States.

- In our example: It will cost us at the most 3045 x 4.85 = $14,768 to install solar panels to halve our power bill. And that’s before wiring, charge controllers, batteries, inverters, and electrician costs.

4 - Offset Tax Credits And Rebates:

Before you think you are going to have to fork out at least $14,768 for only 3045 Watt of solar panel power, you need to consider the effect of government subsidies and incentives.

With the new renewable energy tax credits going into effect from January 1, 2009, and state-side rebates from states such as New York, Connecticut, New Jersey or California, our solar installation costs will be much lower than expected.

- Let’s use our example: If we were from California we would receive tax rebates of about 20% of the cost, and a federal tax credit of 40% on the remainder. So after rebates and credits, our solar panels would cost us:

$14,768 - $14,768 x (20%) - $14,768 x (1 - 20%) x 40% = $7,089.

Just remember that this formula is basic way for you to get an idea of what home solar power will cost you. Some things could not be factored in - such as the state or country you live in, the special offers of local solar companies and the cost of the other parts (inverters, charge controllers, batteries, installation fees).

However, from the example, you can see that for Californian to reduce their power bill by half, they would have to buy $14,768 worth of solar panels, costing them $7089 after rebates. A cheaper option would be to learn to source affordable and even free solar cells, and build your own solar panels. This can be done by following a relatively inexpensive step-by-step solar power manual, such as Earth4Energy.

Great news for you is that you can now try the Earth4Energy Instruction Manual for FREE, before deciding to build your own solar/wind power system, and cutting your energy costs by as much as 80%. Another guide to consider getting is Efficient Planet. Click on the link to read the full review.

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