solar panels what would be the normal output for an average home.?
Monday, November 30th, 2009 at
9:44 pm
Im thinking of making my own solar panels from scratch, could anyone tell how many panels i would need to give me a decent saving on my fuel bills, what would be the average power output set up for an average home? also it would be ongrid rather than off grid.
Filed under: Solar Homes
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average solar system costs: $95 per sq ft
Average solar panel output 10.6 watts per sq ft
average solar energy system costs: $8.95 per watt or 0.38 per kwh
You would not be permitted to connect homemade panels to the grid, and homemade panels are neither as cheap nor as good as some websites would have you believe. If you think about it, if it worked, you would see people in your neighborhood with homemade panels.
A commercial system costs about $6 per watt, after rebates and incentives. Sometimes you can do a little better. If you are in a location that gets a lot of sun all year round, and has high electricity prices, solar might be a good deal for you. It generally does not pay back right away – you would pay maybe $10k – $20k up front, and make that back in electric bill savings over the next 10 or 15 years. After those years, it’s pretty much pure profit. Your best bet is to contact a solar installer near you for a bid. The pro can tell you what size of system, if any, would be a good deal for you.
First get a copy of your power bills for a full year from your power company, I was able to download a copy of my usage for a full year by accessing the power companies web site. Then take the average monthly power usage to get a good estimate of what your normal power requirements are, this will be in kilo-watt-hours. Then divide this number by the average days in a month to get your average kilo-watt-hours per day, and divide this number by the number of hours per day that your solar panels will generate electricity. You should get a value between 2 and 5 Kilo-watts per hour.
This is the amount of electricity you will need to generate to meet your average house hold power usage. You should generate excess power during the peak hours of the day from 9 AM to 3 PM which you need to store in a battery bank and use later in the day when there is no sun light.
You will need to contact your power company service provider to see what their requirements are for you to connect solar panels to the grid.
Each solar cell will generate between 0.5 and 0.55 volts DC, and the size and material the cell is made of will determine how much current it can generate. You should design your solar panels to generate at least 14 volts DC or 28 cells. You can easily charge a 12 volt battery with this panel.
Do not make a panel over 36 volts DC or connect your panels in series to generate over 36 volts DC. If you exceed about 42 volts, you will now have to meet UL or CA or your countries requirements for hazardous voltages. This is very expensive to do.
There are many 12 volt DC to 120 volt AC inverters available that meet these requirements. The inverters will also have to have the capability to lock onto the phase of the AC power provided by your service provider. These inverters will probably have to be approved by your service provider.
We have a pdf list of manufactures and solar cells that they provide on the products page of our blog at http://brutuscontry.com/blog
The first thing is avoid going for the electric (photovoltaic route). Solar does not convert to electricity very well. If you go solar to electricity they’re only about 14% efficient and expensive even if you do it yourself. I was quoted $28,000 to put PV panels on my roof to cut my electric bill by about $25/month.
Solar for heating (hyrdonic) is another story. It’s cheap, easy to do yourself, I recommend focusing your efforts on it instead. It can be as simple as coiling a black tube in the sun or as sophisticated as purchasing the solar panels and you do the plumbing and controls. Even an advanced solar hydronic system installed professionally that will almost exclusively heat your house & all the hot water you need should cost less than an introductory PV house system.