Solar Panels For Your Home – Purchase Or Build Your Own
Solar Panels For Homes
Solar panels for homes can provide all the power you need for all the electrical items you use in your home. The costs of purchasing a solar energy system are more than if you are building your own solar panels, but either way, the energy savings you gain by going solar far outweighs doing nothing at all. By improving the efficiency of your electricity use, you can effectively reduce your energy consumption price to nearly free.
The important things to consider is the output you will need from your solar panels, what additional items you need for operation, how you will control them, and whether you will purchase them and have them installed, or build and install them yourself.
How Much Will it Cost?
The design of your system begins with an analysis of your energy needs. Creating a diagram that shows what your current energy use is both in overall KWH you use and for individual appliances will be useful to not only know how you are currently using energy (this may surprise you), but it will also show you ways that you can modify your energy use in the future.
You can start by looking at the KWH number shown on your electric bill and divide that number by 30 to get your average daily usage. So if you use 800 KWH. That gives you your average daily usage. So, if you use 700 KWH that is 26.66 KWH per day.
Then you have to take your average KWH per day usage and divide that be the number of full sun hours you get per day on a yearly average and multiply it by 1.15. This will tell you how many watts of solar panel you will need to fully sustain your current energy usage. For example, if you get 6 hours of full sun per day, you divide 26.66 by 6 to get 4.44 KW, or 4,444 watts. Multiply that by 1.15 and you get 5,111 watts of solar panels you need to install.
Average installed cost of solar electric if you do it yourself is around $7 per watt, or $9 if you have it installed by a licensed contractor. That includes the cost of the panels, inverters, wire, mounts, and other hardware.
That cost does not include any extras you may need such as inspections or extra power meters installed by the electric company. In the example shown, that solar panel system will cost about $40,000. A battery based system will cost around 20-30% more.
How much will you save by going solar?
In the United States, you can get a 30% Solar Investment Tax Credit and depending on the state you live in, you can get things like Property Tax exclusions for Solar Energy and other incentives. In addition, any excess energy you create can be sold back to the electric company.
With solar, no matter what, the system will pay for itself in its lifetime. You can usually expect a 7-11% return on your investment and you can also expect the house to increase in value by as much as the system costs.
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