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| 4 Steps To Calculating Your Home's Solar Power Needs And Expenses |
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With America's change of government has come a larger interest in people wanting to use solar power at home, to aid global warming and save on their increasing electricity bills. 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 - 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. Then divide your monthly usage by 30 (the average number of days in a month, to get your daily power used. - 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. - So if you want to cut your bill by 50%, then the amount of solar power needed is 26.7/2 = 13.4 kWh per day. 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). - Continuing from our example: Our solar panel watt needs equal: 13.4 kWh required / 5.5hrs of insolation x 1.25 = 3.045 kW or 3045 Watts daily. This indicates that our home solar power system must have the minimum capacity to produce 3045 Watts of power. 3 - Calculate Solar Panel Watt Costs: Next you need to work out how much it will cost to buy solar panels that produce at least 3045 Watts. Currently the highest average cost for solar panels in North America is $4.85 a Watt. - Following on from our example, the solar panels will cost 3045 x 4.85 = $14,768 to only halve our monthly power costs. This excludes the cost of wiring, charge controllers, batteries, inverters, and installation fees. 4 - Offset Tax Credits And Rebates: Before we jump the gun and think it will cost us at least $14,768 for 3045 Watts of solar panel watt power, we need to take tax incentives and rebates in account. 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. - 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. A word of warning: The formula outlined here will give a rough estimate of what you can expect to pay for your solar panel watt needs. Obviously the costs will differ with regard to special offers, the state you reside in and the contractor you use to install the system. 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. About the Author: Good news is that you can now try the Earth4Energy Guide for FREE, before deciding to build your own solar/wind power system, and slashing your electricity bill by as much as 80%. Another guide to consider getting is Efficient Planet. Click on the link to read the full review. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites                  |
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