Can two solar panels power a whole house? My house has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, air conditioning, electric kitchen appliances, a 24″ TV, and a computer.

I’m sorry to tell you that the answer is no. I’ve lived off the grid for 15 years and solar panels have come a long way. Even with the most expensive solar panels on the market, you would need about 15 solar panels and a dozen or so deep cycle batteries. If you live in the desert or any environment where you really need to run your air conditioning a lot, then you will need even more. Your air conditioner is the most power hungry “appliance” in your home.

You may want to use solar panels to power your whole house excluding the air conditioner. For your air conditioner, switch it over to gas.

Also, if you work during the day, leave your air conditioner off. In this case, your solar panel system that is powering your whole house is generating power and making your meter run backwards as you are selling the energy during the day back to the power company. Then when you get home at night, you buy energy from them when you turn your AC on.

You should be able to cut your bill by 75% or more doing this as long as you don’t live in too hot a climate and thus don’t have to run your AC that much at night.

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I need to know how expensive solar panels are and how much to install. I know that you can’t just put up solar panels and expect them to power your whole house. You have to convert the sunlight and store it in a battery bank. How expensive is that? How much does it cost for everything?

If you go to a professional solar power company and tell them you want enough solar panels to power your whole house, it will cost you between $20,000 and $50,000. There are some state programs that might subsidize this cost and there are also Federal income tax incentives.

Now if that’s too much money for you, then you should consider building your own solar panel system. Basically it’s a piece meal approach where you gradually build more and more solar panels and take more and more appliances in your home off the electricity grid until finally your whole house is solar power.

For a home of about 1,500 to 2,000 square feet, you would probably need about 300 to 400 square feet of panels. You would be generating electricity only in the daylight hours. That energy goes to your battery bank. The panels should be directed close to perpendicular to capture the sun’s rays at noon. The optimum would be to follow the sun through its arc. The energy is changed with an inverter to A/C power and connected to the main electric grid, sold back to the power company when you are producing excess, you would draw back from the grid when you are needing more than you are producing.

For detailed plans on how to do this go to how to build your own solar power system to power your whole house.

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How do I figure out how many solar panels I need to run my house?

This depends on your goal. If you wish to produce all of the electricity in terms of annual kilowatt hours that you use, your calculations should include that you will only get about 1/6 of the total energy output from an optimally place panel. That is a one kilowatt panel could produce at most 24 kilowatt hours in a 24 hour day if the sun were to shine continuously. Realistically, the 1 kilowatt panel will produce about 4 kilowatt hours per day.

Now, figure out how many kilowatt hours you use per year. Divide that number by 365 to get the average daily usage. Then divide that by 4 to get the number of 1 kilowatt panels you will need which are optimally oriented.

If you want an automatic calculator that does this calculation for you and even lets you put in the appliances you will be running off of it, go to:
http://www.mysolarsecret.com/solar-power-calculator.html

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