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Solar panels? On MY house? *Can be locked*
ChillyWilly
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
General question here because I'm at work at I don't feel like doing the research myself: How cost effective are solar panels? I normally pay around $150 a month for utilities (usually more at peak winter/summer months) and I'm wondering how much it would take to heat/cool/power a roughly 1350 sq ft house.
I know absolutely nothing about solar panels, so take me to school!
I know absolutely nothing about solar panels, so take me to school!
PAFC Top 10 Finisher in Seasons 1 and 3. 2nd in Seasons 4 and 5. Final 4 in Season 6.
ChillyWilly on
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lots of info there, they pay off pretty well to places that get lots of sun afaik.
In my opinion, solar heat is much more economical than solar electricity, but the unreal subsidies don't exist for it. At the very least it can minimize your bill for water heating.
This doesn't matter. We have solar and our meter simply runs backwards during the day while we are at work.
For what it's worth we have a 1800 sqft house and a 2.2mw system, and our electric bill for the year is under $400. And that's with a hot tub running all winter. If it weren't for that we'd be making money.
I assume you mean kW :P
Hah! Yes, kilowatts. Whoops!
@Pel, yes- we are credited for power generated at the sale rate, so power generated during the hottest part of the day is worth more than early morning or late afternoon. It works out well since we generate lots more power than we use with just the a/c running to keep the house cool for the cats while we're at work.
In a nutshell, you don't want your peak usage to line up with peak generation. The way it works is, you don't generate power to be consumed in your house, you simply feed power into the grid. If you feed more than you pull the meter goes backwards and you earn credit which you spend at night and on weekends. As far as I know all residential power generation works like this, including wind and geothermal.
Furthermore, some utility companies offer something called net metering. What that means is they only bill you once a year- this is nice because you get 14 hours of daylight in June versus 10 hours in December. So any credit you build up in June when power is expensive can be spent in December when it is cheap. That's how we got a year's worth of power for $400.
Our system was installed when the house was built 2 years ago, so it's fairly representative of current technology. It will break even for us in about 4 more years assuming electric rates stay flat. Not bad considering it won't need any maintenance for 23 more years.
OP: The best way to figure out your max usage is to look at your power bills from the summer months. If you're really considering it, check with your state government and utility company and see what their incentives are before proceeding.
It's not that unusual these days, especially for southern California. Solar is cheap as hell compared to where it was five years ago.
It is much cheaper than it was and Southern Cal is also pretty much the ideal PV market right now - generous state subsidies and smart utility companies combined with a high annual sun exposure. Where I live, the subsidies aren't as good and we have clouds fairly often so my payback time is more on the order of 20 years, which is too close to the typical panel life (30 years...and power output starts to decrease before then) to be worth it.