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Question:

How many solar panels do you need on your house to power your heater in winter?

nan

Answer:

I okorder /... To run your pump 24 hr you need 028 m^2 = 0.254 acres. In July the solar insolation is 5.92 kW-hr/day/m^2 and you need 0.042 acres to run the pump for 24 hours. Further south in the US, the numbers are more favorable.
Lets assume the panels are 00 Watt panels. You would need 50 panels to just provide power for the heating maybe 2-4 hours a day on nice sunny days. Get the picture? Remember the rating on a panel is peak power when the sun is at just the right position. Solar panels are not normally a good system for heat or air conditioning. They simply get much to large and expensive, and are not reliable because the sun does not always shine. If you are in an area where the electric company will purchase any power you do not use and give you a credit, then you can build a system much larger than you need in the spring and fall and might be able to produce enough during these periods and get a credit. You then use the credits in the winter for heat and in summer for cooling. This requires a detailed study of your uses all year, then designing a system that produces enough to cover your yearly KWH load. It will probably be very expensive, but many are using taxpayer dollars subsidies and electric company rebate programs to make these system more cost-effective. You would need to check your local area utility company.
As a solar installer, I'd love to give you a simple answer but I can't. Most solar contractors offer a free solar evaluation where they will tell you how much energy they can generate given your site conditions, what it would cost, and how long the payback would be. Rather than a bunch of inexperienced people giving you a bunch of hypotheticals, I think this would be the best option.
You can get over 5 times the efficiency at lower cost by directly absorbing the heat in a solar water-heating collector. Use the electrical panels for making electricity for stuff that needs it.
Your house, and probably your yard wouldn't be big enough to hold them. I did this exercise once (not doing it again) for someone who wanted to replace his 6hp outboard motor with a solar powered one. The calculations ended up that he would need something like .5 acres of solar panels to get that much energy. Not happening. That said, an passive solar home, can get a significant amount of warmth from the sun directly. But it doesn't work very well at night, when it's coldest. (wonder why that is... probably a climate scientist could help us with that? -- oh, wait. They say warming doesn't have anything to do with the sun.) Edit. I didn't use theoretical stuff to come up with my numbers, I used the claims of actual off-the-shelf solar panels sold by West Marine, calculated the power, and did the math based on existing panels.

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