My house uses 500 kw a month, air conditioning is the main consumer, is it possible to install solar panels in my roof to produce this amount, and aproximate cost, thanks .
There okorder / Why pay thousands of dollars for solar energy ($27,000 average cost) when you can build your own solar panel system for just a fraction of the retail cost. You can build a single solar panel or you can build an entire array of panels to power your whole house. Some people are saving 50% on their power bill, some people are reducing their bill to nothing. But what’s most impressive is that just by following these instructions some are even making the power company pay them!
here's the cost 50 KW-hr per day. Depending where you live, there is a chart showing the average expected amount of energy from a solar panel based on the panels peak rating. Lets use 5 hours as an average. This means you need 50 kw-hrs over 5 hours or 0 kw of peak performance. The cost to install a complete grid tied system is running from $6 to $9 per watt, depending on size and how your house sits. Typically, for a system this size, $7.5/watt or the total cost is $75,000. The federal government and some state on local government pays part of the cost. Your net cost will be $50,000. If you put $50,000 in a 0 year CD, you'd earn $250 per month in interest. On the average, a 500 kw-hr bill will run $225 per month. In my town it runs $50 and I'd need a larger system because I get less than 5 hours on average. So I'd earn $275 in interest. In CA, your electric bill would be $300.
I assume you mean 500 KWH (Kilowatt Hours) A good panel may produce about 00Watts. It will cover about 2SQ FT. Lets say you have a ranch style house that is 2000 SQ FT. That means if you covered your entire roof with panels, you could get about 65 panels on the roof(Not really, because you need room to get around them. Lets say practically you could get 00 panels on the roof. You could produce 00X00, or 0,000 Watts/hour (0 KW/HR)when the sun is at peak. Each hour you would produce 0 KW HR's. Lets say your area is perfect and the sun shines bright 0 hours a day, so You could potentially produce 00 KW HRS. There are losses envolved in the wiring, Battery Charger, Storage Batteries, and rectifier-controller. Maybe more realistically you could get 70 KW HRS per day. Maybe you could get 500 KWH in about 2 days. Each panel will cost about $500-$700. Panels alone will be over $50,000. The entire system installed about $00,000. This should cover your electric at least during sunny times. If you live outside of Arizona, lots of luck. Still much cheaper to ude the grid.
Replace your compression driven airconditioner with a gas fired absorption cycle air conditioner (there'll be a government subsidy or grant for that due to the R22 being phased out), install vacuum tube solar thermal collectors at a tenth the price of solar photovoltaics and use the hot water for the absorption cycle heat source with the natural gas burners as a backup. This avoids all the energy losses involved in the various energy conversions and solar thermal uses all wavelengths of solar energy while many photo-voltaics uses only one wavelength (newer dye based, multi layer, and quantum dot photovoltaics are all about using more than one wavelength of light). Solar thermal will also give you hot water and residential heating which are the other two big energy uses in a home. If you are bent on spending ten times the money on photovoltaics instead of solar thermal then figure out how many hours you actually run your AC for, use the filter replacement counter on your programmable thermostat to give you how long your fan is running in days and multiply that by 24 then divide your 500 kw/hrs by this value and since the power company only buys power from you at half the price that they will sell it to you at and you will have to buy power back at night, multiply by a fudge factor of say .5, this gives you a rough estimate of how many watts of solar panels you'll need to install in kilowatts, multiply this by 0,000 and that's roughly how much it will cost you in dollars (assuming $0 per watt installed, solar cells can be as low as $ per watt to manufacture but those aren't available yet and you also need to have them assembled into panels and installed so $0 per watt is a reasonable figure, people usually use values from $4 per watt through $9 per watt). Then after you get over the sticker shock, reconsider solar thermal.
