How Much Do Solar Panels Cost?

With the focus on clean and environmentally sound energy sources, many people are considering installing solar panels for their homes. This leads to the question of expenditure. The first thing that would be asked is “How much do solar panels cost?”

Interestingly enough, when you’re asking that question, you’re inquiring about two separate things. The first item would relate to the actual cost of a solar panel, while the second item relates to the total cost of powering your home with solar energy.

You also need to consider whether you want to purchase pre-made solar panels with installation costs included or make them yourself. For the panels, themselves, a pre-made solar panel can run about $900 for a single panel (that’s about $12 a watt). This translates into a medium-sized system, designed to power a smaller home, costing approximately $25,000. A large home, using pre-made panels, may require a system that costs over $50,000.

Most people don’t think in terms of building their own solar panels, but it’s actually quite easy. All that’s needed are a few common house tools, a little effort and a good solar panel kit. With these at your disposal, you can construct your own solar panels at a fraction of the cost of pre-made panels.

Also, once you’ve set up your own solar panels, there are available tax credits from federal, state and local sources that can mitigate the costs of your solar panel system. When taking advantage of this option, it’s not uncommon to save up to one-half of the initial costs of building a solar panel system. All you need to do is check your state government’s website to see what’s available.

Another way to look at this question would be “how much will it cost for me to buy enough panels to power my home?” This, of course, will depend on the size of your home and other factors, as well. These factors can include; the amount of energy consumption that is normal for your home, how much sunlight your home receives and even the direction that your home faces. Therefore, the only thing that we can do here is to look at the energy consumption for a “typical” home, to use as a theoretical comparison.

In this case, the best way to figure out the cost for your home’s solar panels is to determine how much energy your house actually uses. This can be achieved by taking a look at your monthly electric utility bills. It’s also important to take into consideration any seasonal changes in electricity usage as well (air-conditioning, etc.). Because of this, you should look at monthly electric charges over a period of an entire year then divide by 12. This will show you the number of kilowatt hours (kW h) you use, per month, on average. Multiply this by 1,000 to get the monthly Watt/Hours of electricity used.

When you divide this number by 30, you’ll get the average number of Watt/Hours that you use, on a daily basis. Divide this number by the number of hours that your home receives sunlight. Since this changes with the seasons, it’s best to use the amount of sun that your home receives on the shortest day of the year, in your location (just to be conservative).

Now you have a good idea of how much electricity needs to be generated, for each hour of daylight that your home gets, in order to power your house. You can just match this number with the number of solar panels and their energy output.

Once you do this, it will become apparent that constructing your own solar panels is a highly effective way of saving money when setting up a home solar energy system and with the increasing efficiency of solar cells this process will just become easier and easier!