How To Calculate Solar Panel Costs per Watt
With our current financial meltdown and energy costs fluctuating day-to-day, several of us are thinking of installing solar power to contribute to our homes’ energy requirements, and decrease our electricity bills.
But how much solar panel watt power do we want to cut our electricity bills in half? And how much will that power cost us to install?
Here is a four-step method that you can comply with to answer these two crucial questions:
Contents
1 – Calculate Daily Power Consumption:
To do this, get your final 12 monthly power bills and calculate your average kilowatt-hour (kWh) usage per month. The purpose we use 12 is since our power consumption fluctuates with the seasons. But if you do not have all your electric bills, then simply use final month’s one.
Then divide your monthly usage by 30 (the average quantity of days in a month), to get your day-to-day power employed.
– So for example: If you have a monthly power consumption of 800 kWh, then your day-to-day quantity is 800/30= 26.7 kWh per day.
– Now if you want to cut your power bill in half then you want to generate 26.7 / 2 = 13.4 kWh of solar panel watt power per day.
2 – Calculate Total Solar Panel Watt Needs:
As soon as you know your day-to-day sunlight hours, go back to your day-to-day kilowatt hours necessary and divide it by the day-to-day sunlight hours, then multiply it by an issue of 1.25 (takes into account energy losses from the solar panel watt wiring, battery , and inverter)
– Continuing from our example: Our solar panel watt requirements equal:
13.4 KWh / 5.5hrs x 1.25 = 3.045 kW or 3,045 Watts per day.
This means we want solar panels with the capacity to generate at least 3,045 Watts of power.
3 – Calculate Solar Panel Watt Costs:
This step will help you work out the cost of the solar panels necessary to make 3,045 Watts of power. At the moment, the average cost for solar panels in the US is $4.00 per Watt.
– In our example: It will cost us at the most 3,045 x 4.00 = $12,180 to install solar panels to halve our power bill. And that’s before wiring, charge controllers, batteries, inverters, and electrician costs.
4 – Offset Tax Credits And Rebates:
Before we jump the gun and believe it will cost us at least $12,180 for 3,045 watts of solar power, we want to take tax incentives and rebates in account.
With the new renewable energy tax credits going into effect and stateside rebates from states such as New York, Connecticut, New Jersey or California, our solar installation costs will be lower than anticipated.
– Lets use our example: If we had been from California, we would acquire tax rebates of about 20% of the cost, and a federal tax credit of 30% on the remainder. So soon after rebates and credits, our solar panels would cost us:
$12,180 – $12,180 x (20%) – $12,180 x (1 – 20%) x 30% = $6,821.
Considering that there are several factors that go into calculating your solar panel costs, please only use our actions as a rough estimate. Some issues had been impossible for us to take into account, such as unique offers by solar installation corporations, where they supply you discounts on the full installation (like charge controller, inverter, battery, grid-tie electrician costs, etc.).
Anyway, from our solar power watts calculation, you can see that it would cost us around $6,821 to buy adequate solar panels to halve our power bill. We, instead, either get our solar cells at cost or supply them for cost-free, and wire up our personal solar panels, which certainly saved us a lot of revenue. The excellent news is that anybody can do research to obtain cheap solar PV cells.
