Watts? Solar Panel? For My House.?
Question:
Answer:
If you want to power your house primarily with solar panels and buy little or no energy from the utility, you will need batteries to store up energy when the sun is shining for use at night and when it is cloudy. That means that your solar panels need to provide your average kilowatt hour requirement during the average number of hours of sun. You can find your average kilowatt hours for a month by looking at your utility bills.
Looking at your loads, the big ones are the ones that might be either gas or electric, the cooking stove, the clothes dryer, the water heater. You probably don't have electric heat, but a gas fired hot air furnace has a blower that uses quite a bit of electricity. An air conditioner uses more than that. A refrigerator would probably be next on the list. You can probably find a list of typical power requirements for appliances on a utility company web site or someplace on the Internet. All electrical load items will be marked with either the watts or amps required. If amps are given, watts = volts X amps. New refrigerators and water heaters often or perhaps always have labels giving the average expected kilowatt hours for some period of time. You can go to a store and look at new appliances to get an idea what average usages are. For other items, you will need to estimate how many hours per day they are used.
One place to look for additional information is http://www.homepower.com/.
aks your power company they should be able to help you. or search the web, like renewableenergy.com or google it.
voltage x amps = watts
80 watts is like 1 light bulb
8000 watts is a Range
3000 Water Heater
5000 Dryer
1500 Washer
1200 Dishwasher
1500 Fridge
1000 Hair dryer
now to heat & cool,use larger of the two loads,depends on the square feet & the climate where the house is.I realize none of this is a constant load nor derated.I hope this helps you,the small things we use in life really add up.New standard homes usually have at least a 200 Amp Service
First thing you need to know is that you do not have to have enough solar modules to power everything in your home. You may run a 1500 watt burner on your stove for 30 minutes and you may run a 1850 watt hair dryer for 15 minutes and the 1200 watt microwave for 5 minutes along with the Freezer kicking on and off three times a day for a half hour. If you have 5 hours of sun light a day and 5000 watts in solar power.. Well that is 25,000 watts a day. I never use that much myself.
Get your last 12 electric bills and total the kWh used for the whole year. Divide it by 365 to find your daily usage.
What area do you live in? How many peak sun hours do you get in your area? Look up the Key Word "solar isolation map" and find out.
http://www.oynot.com/solar-insolation-ma...
Divide your daily usage by the hours you find on that map and you will have how many watts in solar modules you require.
There is a lot more to it then just buying a bunch of solar modules. You will need roof or ground mounts, Grid Tie inverter, Combiner box, Grounding rod, Lightning arrestor and a few other things. So you could pick a kit in the size you require with everything aready in it.
http://store.oynot.com/gts-grid-tie-syst...
Then hire someone in your area to install the parts of it you can't.
Keep it Safe and legal.
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