Sizing a solar panel system to your home s electric usage can be done by taking look at your energy bills over a year.
How much electricity do solar panels generate per square metre.
But every home is unique and could use more or less power than the average home.
Thus the output for each solar panel in your array would.
5 hours x 290 watts an example wattage of a premium solar panel 1 450 watts hours or roughly 1 5 kilowatt hours kwh.
To produce the maximum amount of power per square foot a solar panel has to be well designed to handle temperature spectrum angle and amount of light.
So the kwh divided by the hours of sun equals the kw needed.
Energy information administration in 2018 the average monthly electricity consumption for a home in the united states was 914 kwh per month or about 30 5 kwh per day and 11 000 kwh per year.
According to the u s.
That translates to just over 15 watts per square foot.
The standard solar panel has an input rate of around 1000 watts per square meter and the majority of solar panels available have around 15 20.
Some people associate solar power with heat because heat is.
The average sized solar panel takes up an area of 17 6 square feet and produces 265 watts under direct sunlight.
For the sake of example if you are getting 5 hours of direct sunlight per day in a sunny state like california you can calculate your solar panel output this way.
But how much electricity your solar panels produce depends on several factors.
A common size solar panel array is usually around 5kw and takes up around 400 square feet of space.
The real test of a photovoltaic pv solar system is how well it works in real world conditions.
Therefore it is very possible to generate enough energy to cover 100 of your needs.
For instance if the surface area is 1 500 square meters and the rating of the panel is 250 watts you would divide 250 by 1 500 and then multiply by 100 to find the percentage.
How many solar panels do i need for 1 000 kwh per month.
An array of this size can produce an average of 350 850 kwh of ac energy per month.
Let s estimate you get about five hours per day to generate that 30 kwh you use.
For this example the solar panel in question would have an efficiency rating of 16 67 250 1500 x 100 16 67.
To put that into perspective a typical household uses about 897 kwh per month.
Or 30 kwh 5 hours of sun 6 kw of ac output needed to cover 100 of your energy usage.
For a 300 watt solar panel with dimensions 64 inches x 39 inches 1 61 meters squared or 17 31 square feet the peak instantaneous electricity production per square foot at stc is 14 58 watts per square foot.
Therefore if your solar panel was 1 square meter in size then it would likely only produce around 150 200w in good sunlight.
