As you have seen Solar Home System Watts to produce?.
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Determine the power requirements of your house is the first step in the planning phase for a new home solar system.
It is important to install a system large enough to take care of your needs, but if your system is too large, you are wasting money since the power company may only issue credit up to the amount of your annual usage.
Of course, if you live on the grid, you can simply look at your account and find out how many kilowatt hours of electricity per month and divide by the number of days used to get the daily use.
I suggest you go a little further than that because you are making a big investment in time and money to get this project done.
Most people have never had time to analyze their use, and usually lose a lot of power.
You really must look at ways to save energy because it may be possible to significantly reduce the size of your solar system.
Saving energy and money by using the right system size.
Now is the time to analyze each appliance and your lighting to see if you could improve your usage numbers.
The refrigerator may be older and not a version of the Energy Star.
Is your air conditioner or dryer older? It would be cost effective to replace these and not plan for their current energy use.
You might also consider changing some of your natural gas appliances, such as a much cheaper source of energy.
Have you switched your lighting to the new compact fluorescent bulbs and put your televisions and other electronic equipment on power strips so they are not always drawing power.
Contact your local power company and see if it can help with an energy audit.
Most utilities are only too willing to help since they can avoid the capital investment in new plants if they can help customers save electricity usage.
Calculate watt-hour usage for your home.
If you are planning a battery back-up or off grid system, you must tighten up your planning even more because the additional cost of battery systems makes it even more important not to over build your solar system.
The best way to do this is to make a chart that lists all electrical items do at home, use the number of hours and hours of watts consumed for each element.
Thus you can calculate the watt hours of energy consumed for each item and find the total watt hours required for your house for a day.
The construction of this list will also help you in your energy audit because it will bring to light exactly where you use electricity, so you can more changes to make your use.
Once you have arrived at the final figure for watt hours usage, you must adjust it for the inefficiency of a solar system.
because the batteries only at 95% efficiency, inverters operate and work with an efficiency of 90%.
Once these adjustments are made, we are ready to go to the next step which is to calculate how many watts of power your solar system will produce in your location.
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