How Much Is A Solar Panel

hi. i’m amy at the alte store. probablythe most frequently asked question we get here is, “how much solar does it take topower my 2,000 sqft home?” my answer is always the same. “i don’t know. how muchpower do you use?” i’m not trying to be flip, i honestly don’t know. the power usagefor different homes are going to be so wildly different, there is no way of knowing howmuch power someone uses based on their square

How Much Is A Solar Panel, footage. is the house located in the northwith bad insulation and electric baseboard heaters? or is it a house with a tight buildingenvelope and gas heat? is it located in the south with the highest loads being air conditioningrun 24/7, or is it in a mild environment with a couple of fans occasionally? are you heatingyour water with an electric water heater,

or an oil furnace? do you have family memberswho find it challenging â to turn off a light when they leave the room (you know who youare)? are you lighting with incandescent or led light bulbs? the best way to determine how many solar panelsyou need is to look at your electric bill and see how many kwh a month you buy. youcan then go to our grid-tied calculator to see how much solar would be needed to offseta percentage of your bill. here’s an example of my electric bill. itshows 13 months of usage, so i can compare the latest month with the previous year. it is amazing what you can learn by studyingyour electric bill. by comparing the usage

in different months, i can see my biggestuse is in the summer, with the air conditioner running all day because of the home office.you can see that my usage dropped significantly from august 2013 to august 2014, as well asfrom july to august in 2014. we went away everyweekend in august 2014, and turned the ac off while we were gone, saving us $85 fromthe previous year. but unfortunately, we went away for a week that july and forgot to turndown the ac, so it stayed on high, cooling an empty house all week. you can see that’sthe highest usage in 13 months, and was completely preventable. that mistake cost me about $160.in november we switched the mini-split from ac mode to heating mode to delay turning onour oil heat, bringing our electric usage

back up. it cost an extra $135 to heat thehouse with electricity that month, but saved us at least that much on our oil bill. bydecember it was too cold for the heat pump to work, so we turned it off and turned onthe oil, dropping our electric use. so even in the same house, with the same people, behaviorchanges the electrical use dramatically, thus changing the answer to the original question,“how much solar do i need to power my house?” â i recommend you look at your monthly usageand analyze it, what was your big energy user each month, and could a change in behaviorreduce it? once you understand your electric use, then you can start to figure out howmuch solar you need. our average use is about 1,500kwh a month.i used that number in our on-grid calculator

and decided to see what it would take to makeall of our power with solar, netting us down to 0. that would require around a 13,000 wattsolar system for my area, around 50 solar panels. this chart shows my last 30 monthsof electric use, and the estimated output of a 13kw solar system on my house for thattime. with net metering, i can use any power i generateduring the day, and sell the extra to the grid. then at night, when my system isn’tgenerating any power, i can buy it back from the grid, spinning the meter back and forth.any additional power i need gets bought from the grid, same as usual. likewise, with monthsthat i make more power than i use, like in the spring, i can bank the credits to usethem in the summer and winter when i don’t

make as much as i use. â today’s averagecosts would be around $26,000 to buy the equipment to install it yourself, or about $52,000 tohave one professionally installed (depending on equipment and location). a combinationof federal and local incentives could cut the cost by â…“ to â½ in the us, dependingon your location. this system could pay for itself in about 8 years for me. after that,and for the next couple of decades that my system keeps humming along, the $3000 a yeari was paying to the electric company stays in my pocket. plus with rate increases, thatsavings is bound to grow over the years. but a nice thing about net metering, and stayingconnected to the grid, is i don’t have to make all of my power like if i was off-grid.i can instead decide to make half my power,

or less, and buy the rest from the grid, resultingin â a lower monthly electric bill. you can see from this graph that charts bothmy monthly use and my projected monthly solar generation with a 6.5kw solar system, thatfor a couple of months i actually would make all of the power that i use, but on average,i would make half of the power i needed, cutting my power bill in half. that still gives mea significant monthly savings. solar isn’t the silver bullet for reducingmy electric bills. we’re also working on further reducing our power use. we recentlyreplaced all of the shop lights in the basement with led tubes. this brought that power usefrom 2500w down to about 250w! and the light quality is actually better now than with theold lights. we’ve replaced all of our incandescent

light bulbs throughout the house with ledas well. we’re also trying to get smarter with the programming of the air conditioning,cutting down on our biggest power user. so you can see why the most common questionwe get asked here is also the most complicated and personal question to answer. grab yourelectric bill, go to our calculator, and find the answers for your home. â  i hope this was helpful. if so, give us alike and a share. and check out more of our videos here. also subscribe to our altestorechannel so we can notify you when more videos come out. also go to our website at altestore.com,where we’ve been making renewable do-able since 1999.

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