4 Steps To Calculating Your Home's Solar Power Needs And Expenses

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by: TimMcDonald | Total views: 133 | Word Count: 687

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 how much solar panel watt power do we need to say halve our power bills? And how much will that power cost us to install?

Here is a four step process that you can follow to answer these two vital questions:

1 - Calculate Daily Power Used:

To do this, get your last 12 monthly power bills and calculate your average kilowatt hour (kWh) usage per month. The reason we use 12 is because our power consumption fluctuates with the seasons. The calculation would be to add up the power used over the past 12 months and divide it by 12. But if you do not have all your power bills, then simply use last month's one.

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

- So for example: If you have a monthly power consumption of 800 kWh, then your daily amount is 800/30= 26.7 kWh per day.

- So to reduce your electricity bill to half, 26.7/2 = 13.4 kWh of solar power per day is needed.

2 - Calculate Total Solar Panel Watt Needs:

To work this out you are first going to look at an insolation map to see the average usable hours of sunlight your area receives each day. A map is available on our website.

Now take the average daily kWh calculation and divide that by the number of daily usable sunlight hours, then multiply that by 1.25 (to take into account the wasted energy from wiring, charge controllers. batteries, and inverters).

- From the previous example, if you live near California where the average daily usable hours of sunlight is 5.5 hrs, the solar wattage needed is:

13.4 kWh required / 5.5hrs of insolation x 1.25 = 3.045 kW or 3045 Watts daily.

This tells us that our solar panels must be capable of producing at least 3045 Watts of electricity.

3 - How Much Will This Power Cost You?:

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.

- Continuing with the same example, the cost of the solar panels will be 3045 x 4.85 = $14,768. This is only to reduce our power bill by 50%, and it is before the costs of charge controllers, inverters, batteries, and electricians.

4 - Offset Tax Credits And Rebates:

Before thinking that your solar power investment is going to be $14,768 to only halve your power bill, you need to subtract any tax rebates and subsidies on offer.

The new federal tax incentives and rebates recently came into affect for green energy users. What this means is you will get a considerable credit for installing solar power at home. Not to mention the additional subsidies in states like New York, California, Connecticut, and New Jersey, where the cost of your home solar power investment will be reduced further.

- Continuing on from our example: If we lived in California, our state tax incentives would be about 20 % of the investment, and the federal rebates 40% of the remaining cost. So, our solar panels would only end up costing us:

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

Since there are many factors that go into calculating your solar panel watt costs, please only use our steps as a rough estimate. Some things were impossible for us to take into account, such as special offers by solar installation companies, where they offer you discounts on the full installation (including charge controller, inverter, battery, grid-tie electrician costs, etc).

Anyway, from what you can see it would cost us around $7,089 to buy enough solar panels to halve our power bill. We, instead, either get our solar cells at cost or source them for free, and wire up our own solar panels, which obviously saved us a lot of money. The good news is, anyone can learn to find cheap solar cells and make their own solar panel watt power.

About the Author

If you are interested on building your own solar panels for under $200 and reducing your power bill by as much as 80%, then why don't you Try Earth4Energy for FREE before wasting your money on the wrong advice?!

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