How much solar do you need to run a house. Depends on many factors which we’ll go into in this article.

• Square footage of your house. The first important point to think about when calculating how many solar panels you need.
• Monthly energy usage. This one is really easy to figure out. Just take a look at your electric bill. Electric companies typically add your monthly usage in your bill. Some might even break it down to daily usage. But if your electric company doesn’t add this you can call them to get all this information.
• Location of your solar panels. Where you place your solar panels is going to determine how efficient your solar panels are going to be. Placing solar panels where they can get the most sunlight during all times of the year.
• The cost to maintain your panels. This is a cost that not many think about when buy solar panels. The cost to clean your panels which is your main concern. Many installers cover their work up to 25 years and this covers parts and labor. Which you could lose out on if your install the solar panels yourself.

Now how much solar do you need to run a house?

After taking into account the points above we can now go over how much solar panels you would need. You’ll need to do a bit of research on your own for this but all you need is the hours of ample sunlight in your area and the wattage of the panels you are going to use. So lets say a 1,500 sqft house uses 1201kWh and the panels you are going to have installed are 300 watts and the ample amount of sunlight is about 3.5. The equation would be hours of ample sunlight times your monthly usage then take the product of that and divide by 300 or what wattage panel you choose. So by using are numbers we have above we’d need about 14 solar panels that can run the example house. If you want to play around and figure out for different energy usages this calculator is very helpful for averages and can help you get a better understanding of the math.

Wrapping things up.

Thank you for reading our article I hope that this article gave you somethings to think about before you make your move to energy independence. Check out our next article about solar inverters.