How Many Solar Panels Do You Need? Follow This Easy Breakdown!

apparently there's a lot of math needed to figure out exactly how many panels you need for your house but don't worry in this video i'm going to walk you through the process step by step and it's going to be a lot easier than you think the number of solar panels you need can vary quite a bit depending on a lot of different factors not just the manufacturer and the brand and the specific model of the panels themselves a lot of this depends on your own specific energy consumption needs as well as things like where your house is in the world you know what direction it faces things like that these all play a part into figuring out how many solar panels you need also if you want your solar panels to provide a hundred percent of the power for your home there's some other things you need to keep in mind as well so be sure to stick to the end of the video and i'll have some other tips for you on that as well alright so to really understand how many solar panels you need we need to have three numbers first the first one is we need to know how much power your home uses every day second we need to understand how many peak sun hours your house gets and this is going to depend greatly on where your house is located in the world and in this specific video we're going to focus on the united states and then last but not least we need to know how much energy the solar panels produce all right so first let's tackle how much power your home uses per day and don't worry we're going to have examples as we go along here so even if you don't like math this is going to be really easy to follow in order to find out this information you need a copy of your last month's utility bill ideally you would want the last 12 months worth of utility bills because that will help you average how much your energy consumption is throughout the entire year depending on different seasons and peak energy use and things like that if you have an entire year's worth of information then you can average that out and we can get a more accurate number but if you only have the last month's information that's fine as well you can still do the math here sometimes you can log into your energy company's portal as well and you can get your energy bills on that so once you have your bill you want to look for the number of kilowatt hours used or kwh or something like that that's the number that you'll need to reference or to be able to add up over the last 12 months if you don't have the number of kilowatt hours used look for the beginning and the end meter readings and then you'll be able to subtract the beginning meter reading from the end meter reading to see how much power in kilowatt hours you used in the last month all right so let's run through an example here so this is a download from the information from an energy company's website and this is the last 12 months worth of information all we have to do here is add up the number of kilowatt hours used every month to get a total of 17 484 kilowatt hours for the entire year then we just need to divide that by 365 days and that will give us a total of 47.9 kilowatt hours used per day and that's going to be the average like i said depending on how much energy you use per day and it's going to vary quite a bit depending on the seasons and in different situations so in this example 47.9 is the number of kilowatt hours you we use every day and if you don't have an entire year's worth of information on this that's okay too don't divide it by 365 though just divide the last utility bill by 30 and that will give you your daily number next we need to figure out how many peak hours or sometimes it's called the radiance value of your house and all this really means is how many number of peak sun hours you get per day on average throughout the year so accounting for winter and summer and all these things how many hours of sunlight does your house get at basically full force right so in this case in the united states the number is going to be between six and four roughly but to get a more accurate value i'm going to have a map that shows up here with some information here you can kind of figure out roughly where your house is located in the united states and then map this back to the exact value that you need to use that will give you the most accurate information if you don't want to do that then you could just use a value of four as kind of a default that'll get you in the ballpark where you want to be with this and in fact in our example our number is four so that's what we're going to use now the last number we need in this equation is how many watts each solar panel produces now this is again going to vary greatly depending on the manufacturer and the model of the solar panel that you're looking at it could be anywhere from about 150 watts per panel to around 425 watts per panel and if you don't know exactly what you're looking at right now that's okay i would probably go ahead and plug in about 400 watts just so that way we can do some easy math and figure out a rough estimate as to how many panels you need and 400 watts just so happens to be the number that we're going to use in this example so that's what we'll plug in here all right so now that we have all these numbers we can plug them into an equation and figure out how many solar panels you need all right so here's the formula so what we're going to do is we're going to just plug these numbers in one at a time first we'll plug in the number that we have in our example of 47.9 kilowatt hours in the daily section next we know how many average sun hours we have and that's four so we'll put those here for the peak solar hours and last but not least we will put in 400 for the solar panel watt rating and that will give us this equation of 47.9 kilowatt hours divided by four times four hundred all right so first we need to tackle the four times 400 watts here so this is going to come out to a total of 1600 watts then we need to take that 1600 watts and divide it by a thousand and that will give us the total number of kilowatt hours so that leaves us with 47.9 kilowatt hours divided by 1.6 kilowatt hours and that will give us finally the number of panels needed and in this example it's 30 panels it's slightly under that amount but i rounded up to be sure that everything's covered we would need 30 400 watt panels to be able to supply a hundred percent of our energy needs for our house now while trying to make this map as simple as possible there are still other factors that you need to consider as well if you're looking at solar for your whole house things like whether or not you want to replace all of your energy bill with solar panel or if you just want to replace part of it or most of it with solar energy whether or not you want to be able to sell the energy back to the energy company if you produce too much energy so more energy than your home actually needs whether or not you want to be able to sell that back to the electricity company actually get a check from them every month and there are other factors as well such as whether or not your house actually gets shade that could obstruct some of the solar efficiency of your panels and how steep your roof is all these things play a role into getting an exact number of how many panels you need for your house so to make this somewhat complicated process a lot easier i highly recommend that you talk to someone who actually can give you a comprehensive picture of what it would look like specifically for your house and for your goals whether or not you need all the panels that i talked about in this video or whether or not you need fewer panels or if you have other things that you would need to consider that we really don't cover in this but that would absolutely play a role there are companies that can do quotes online you don't have to necessarily have someone come out to your house to be able to do this they can pull up your house through a satellite image they can go over everything with you typically like through a zoom call for example so they can give you a really clear comprehensive picture of what it would look like to have whole house home solar at your house so if you're interested in doing that i've teamed up with a company called sun power they're actually the oldest solar panel company in the united states and they're i think the only company that's been around longer than their warranty so if you're interested in understanding what this would look like for your house i'll have a link in the description below where you can go and contact them and they can do everything like i talked about they can give you online consultation and go over all of your goals and give you a really clear picture of what it would look like to have solar at your house thanks for watching this video hopefully you found it helpful if you did don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Top Homeowner

Views: 65,156

Keywords: top homeowner, tophomeowner, home solar system, home solar panels, home solar installation, solar energy, solar panels, solar panels for home, solar panels for home cost, best solar panels, solar panels for beginners, solar installation, solar panel system for home, solar power system for home, solar, solar panel system, solar power, how to calculate number of solar panels required, how many solar panels do I need, whole house solar panel system, calculate solar power needs

Id: JqJODEOtoK0

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022