How to Calculate How Much Solar Panel Wattage is Require to Power Your Home

After installing a solar panel unit you may think to extend your system according to the consumption of wattage for your home. You need to know a couple of important factors here, first you household's wattage consumption and second the amount of sun, annually, that your solar panel unit receives. In order to observe this you need to give your solar panel unit at least one year to run, after this you will be able to calculate exactly how much you need to upgrade your solar panel unit in order to run 100% of your electricity from the sun. This will allow you to view each month's power consumption. After you have that figure simply divide it by the numbers of days that you were billed. Then, the per day consumption of power can be figured, put this number in the form of kw-h (kilowatt-hours). Now you can determine exactly how much energy is needed to be generated every day by your solar power system. Based on this you can easily determine how much of an expansion you need on your existing solar panel unit in order to have your electrical bill every month come out to $0.

Now, you have to note the amount of sunlight which you can access. If you are familiar to the place you are living at then you probably know the time when the sunlight is at its brightest and also how much your solar panel can receive and, accordingly, how much it can generate for your family to use. For the best results you should put your panel on the roof top facing the sun at a position where the sunlight will always fall on it. For the correct placement you have take measurements of the roof according to the sun's rays, this task can be a bit problematic. According to experiments done on my rooftop system, 2kw will generate power between 5 to 8.5 kilowatt - hour / day, on average, along the whole year. This was done in Oregon.

Another way to figure this is to look at where you started before you installed your solar panels. Assuming that you have being consuming the same amount of electricity since before you installed your solar panels simply calculate the difference in monthly bills and then attach this to your solar panel's wattage. You now know the percentage of savings your current wattage gets you, scale this up until you hit 100% and you know how many additional solar panels you will require.