What solar panels for homes should I buy

2009-02-03T23:22:00.000-08:00

This is a common question asked by many homeowners during their first time purchase of solar panels for their homes. Experienced solar electricity will actually tell you that the size of your house is not the main determinant on the the size of the solar panel system you should be buying into. The main consideration is actually your monthly electricity consumption which is determined by the type of electrical appliances you have running for long hours at home. They are some people living in big houses that actually consume lesser electricity compared to those living in smaller units. The typical household consumes between 300 kWh - 2000kWh (Kilo Watt hours) per month.

The size of the solar electrical system needed is computed using the expected amount of electricity consumed by your household and how much of these electricity would you like to be replaced by the free solar energy. Let work through an example for finding out the capacity of the solar energy system needed to eliminate your home electricity bill. The monthly home electrical usage can vary month to month but it is sufficient to use a rough average figure. Dig out all the recent copies of your electrical bills to get this average kilowatt hours per month value. Make sure you include the bills for both summer and winter months as the electricity usages for these different seasons can differ significantly. Next, we divide it by 30 in order to get the average daily electricity usage. This is the amount of electrical power needed to be produced daily by the intended solar power system if you wanted to approximately eliminate all your electric bills. Recall that the solar panels only generate electricity in daylight. Hence we need to divide this daily kWh figure by the average number of hours where full sunlight is available at your location. For instance in California, there are approximately 5 hours where the sunlight is bright and can drive the solar panels at full efficiency. The dawn and evening sunlight does not help much, so they are not considered in these calculations. The final figure you get from the above steps is the hourly kW amount of electricity power that must be generated by the solar energy system in order to support your home needs every day. Finally we factor in the PTC rating (PVUsa Test Conditions rating) of the solar module under consideration to compute how many modules are needed to approximately eliminate your electric bills. For example, a typical solar module used in home units has a PTC rating of 100W and the required hourly amount of electricity power is 1.5kW. The required number of modules is 1500W/100W = 15 modules. If you want to nearly eliminate all your electricity bills, you need all 15 solar modules in our example. To approximately reduce the bills by half, you need 8 solar modules. Note that we always round up to the single digit number as solar modules are physical devices.

The above calculations may seem complicated but that is not a problem. http://solarpanelsforbeginners.blogspot.com helps you to choose the ideal solar system for your home electricity needs, reduce your monthly bills by 50% or get generous cash rebates and tax credits from the governments.

Solar Panels For Beginners

What solar panels for homes should I buy