How to get solar power for your home – sizing a solar panel, choosing what type of solar panel is best for you, and calculating the payback time of the solar panel. And finally, the positive impact solar energy will have on your enviroment.

Step 1: Find out Your Power Usage

For this, you need to know:

1. where you live in the States 2. how much power you use.

You can find out how much power you use by checking your power bill for the kWh per month.

Step 2: Find Out How Much Sunlight you can get

To find out how much sunlight you get where you live by checking a solar insolation map. Just type in Solar Insolation Maps into google – I use one from Wikipedia.org

Insolation is a measure of kWh per meter per day – or rather how much solar energy you get on average every day.

Step 3: Do Some Math

By checking against the map you can check how much solar energy you get where you live.

Then, find you daily power use. You can do this by dividing your monthly kWh (from your power bill) by 30 (30 days in a month.)

Step 4: More Math

Then divide this number (your daily power use) by the hours you got from the insolation map. This will give approximately what size solar panel system (in kW) will look after your power needs.

This is a very rough guide. To account for inverter and wire loss, add 30% onto the size of your solar panel system.