Thinking of installing solar power into your home? If so, you will want to know the solar cost. Here’s a word of advice. Before you call up a few solar power experts to find out the solar cost, you will need first to get an estimate of the total power usage in your home.

Finding out the total power usage gives the installer a better sense of the scale of the job. It may also allow them to judge which type of solar system bests suits your household. From there, they can begin to assess the true solar cost.

But how do you estimate your home’s daily energy requirement?

We need to start by finding out the total amount of watts your house uses. To do this, make a list of all your household appliances including lights, water heater, water pumps, radiators, the lot.

Add to this list a note of exactly how many watts each appliance uses. You can find this information either from their labels or from the owner’s manuals for each appliance. If you still cannot find this, check the internet. If all else fails, you could buy a clamp-on ammeter to measure the amperage draw.

Now, simply add up the total wattage used. Put an extra 20 percent on to the total to cover for the extra power needed to start up some appliances.

Now, we want to find the number of watt hours per day on an average day. Bare in mind that if a 300 watt item is used for only 5 minutes every day then it will only consume 25 watt hours per day. Some items like the toaster are used for a mere fraction of an hour.

This way you can work out your total power usage as a rough average in terms of watt hours consumed per day. Once you have your total daily power use for every item that you listed you can simply multiply this figure by 365 to arrive at your total yearly energy use. The solar power installers can work with that figure to establish what systems to use and thereby to arrive at your total solar cost.

As a rough guideline, the average home is roughly 2,000 square foot and has an energy requirement of about 50Kwatts per day. That would make 1500Kwatts per month and therefore 18,000 Kwatts per year.

… Simple when you know how!

Remember that this is just a rough average of your total power usage. You can obviously drill in to this in more detail, but this will be useful information for you to give to your solar power for homes installers so they can prepare their solar cost quotations.

From Sam Deane,
your solar power for homes guide,
at www dot go solar power for homes dot com.

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Info via:ehow.com

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by Sam Deane, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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