A solar home power system turns sunlight into electricity which can be used to power electrical appliances in your home. But before you decide to make a major investment in solar power, you will need to do some research. This research should include finding out how much energy your home uses and your home’s solar electric generating potential. You will also need to investigate whether your utility allows net metering. Determining the cost of the system and whether it will save enough money to pay for itself during its operating lifetime is also important.

Determining your home’s energy use is just a phone call away. Your electric utility company can tell you what your annual energy usage is and what your cost is. Once you know your annual energy use you can determine the size of solar collector you need. The electric company bills you in kilowatt hours. A kilowatt is a thousand watts, and a kilowatt hour is using one thousand kilowatts for an hour. In other words, if you have an appliance which uses 100 watts of energy, it would take ten hours of operation for it to use one kilowatt hour.

Once you know how many kilowatt hours your home consumes during a year, you need to estimate how large a solar cell array you will need. It may be best to consult a contractor or installer who specializes in solar electric installation for sizing the system. You may get a very rough estimate yourself using the rule of thumb that one square yard of collector can produce approximately one kilowatt hour of electricity per day.

Once you have a rough idea of how large of a solar cell array you need, you then need to determine how much room you have for your solar home power system. Normally the solar cells are placed on the roof of a structure. A typical home will need approximately one thousand square feet of solar collector to generate sufficient power. So you will need at least that much roof space for your collector array. If you don’t have that much, then you may want to consider a free standing installation. This type of installation may also be needed if the roof will not support the weight of the solar collector, or if it is not comparable with the roofing material. You may want to think about replacing the roof of the structure when the collector is installed.

Now you need to find out if your electric company has a net metering policy. What net metering is, and why it is important for your solar home power system is an important thing to find out. At times your solar home power system will produce more power than you are using. With net metering, this excess power flows backward through the electric meter into the power company’s grid. With net metering, you will receive a retail credit for this power. Then, during times when the home is using more power than the solar array is producing, these retail credits are applied to the electricity flowing back into the home from the power company’s grid. If the utility company does not allow net metering, you may need to install a battery to store the excess power generated.

With this information in hand you will know what components you will need for your solar home power system. You can then have an estimate of the cost of the system you will need to install. The contractor or sales person will need to inform you of the expected lifetime of the system. Once you know how many years the system will last, you can compare it to your annual electric cost over the same number of years. Whichever number is larger will tell you how economical the installation of the solar home power system will be.

Solar cell technology continues to improve, and the economics of installing a solar home energy system changes dramatically over time. Add to this the fact that future energy costs will probably continue to rise, and you may conclude that installing a solar home energy system is a smart thing to do.

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