Solar Power Home

So you want to solar power your home for the cheapest way possible. So the first thing you need to do is to learn about solar panels.

The first thing you are probably wondering is if it is possible to buy just one solar panel to power your entire home. This is one of the most common questions asked by people looking into installing their own solar power system. You might even have a list of things in your home that you would like to put on this single solar panel such as an air conditioner, dishwasher, TV, and so on.

Unfortunately the answer is a big fat no. You can not generate enough power with just one solar panel to meet the energy consumption needs of your entire home. I have used solar panels for more than 10 years now and I have watched the technology of solar panels progress over the years. But even with the latest, most advanced solar panel, one solar panel is no where near enough power for your entire house. You will need at least 12 solar panels and 12 deep cycle batteries. If you have a central air conditioner on your roof, then you will need even more solar panels and deep cycle batteries if you want 100% of your power to come from the sun. Keep in mind that your air conditioner is the single biggest obstacle you have to tackle first if you want to run your entire house off of solar power energy.

The first aspect of solar power you must learn is that in reality, nothing is powered off of a solar panel. Your home is not like a solar power calculator where a solar panel built right into the face of the calculator can power the calculator (although in actuality a battery does exists inside the calculator that is charged by the solar panel). The only thing a solar panel does is that it charges a battery. You then plug whatever you want to run in your home into that battery by using a DC (batteries are all DC current) to AC converter or what is called an inverter. Now you don’t just use one battery as that would drain the battery too fast before your solar panels had a chance to charge it back up. You wire a string of batteries together (very easy to hook them together in parallel) to form what is called a battery bank. You then run the appliances in your home off this battery bank and not the solar panels. You do this because the appliances in your home need to have a steady supply of current. Voltage spikes that come off of solar panels due to clouds passing in between your solar panel array and the sun are canceled out by the battery bank.

You should slowly increase the number of solar panels by plugging more and more of them into your battery bank as you take more and more things in your home off of the power grid. Don’t move your air conditioner over to the solar panels at first. Instead, consider switching it to gas.

Also, if you work during the day, leave your air conditioner off. In this case, your solar panel system that is powering your whole house is generating power and making your meter run backwards as you are selling the energy during the day back to the power company. Then when you get home at night, you buy energy from them when you turn your AC on.

You should be able to cut your bill by 75% or more doing this as long as you don’t live in too hot a climate and thus don’t have to run your AC that much at night.