Posted Thursday, July 14, 2016

How Much Power Can a Typical Residential Solar System Produce?

As we go about our day-to-day lives, we may not think much about the amount of power we use in our homes and businesses. Sure, there’s power available for use when we need it, but we don’t really seem to be mindful of the cumulative effect that over-consuming grid-based power can be. While there are plenty of other articles on the internet about how to save power (we have some of our own tips, too!), we’re going to be looking at the raw power production that can be achieved with a relatively simple, residential solar power generation system. How much in added power can the sun really give us?

To arrive at a reasonable answer to this question, we’ll use an example of a three bedroom home located in the state of Florida. We’ll assume that the owners or tenants are generally energy-conscious and that they use what an average household would consume in electricity per month (roughly 30.36 kWh per day, or 911 kWh per month).To pay for this amount of power, this household spends about $110. This monthly rate obviously fluctuates with the seasonality of the weather, but overall it’s a good benchmark for our exercise.

The house in question will have sun-facing roof space available enough to fit solar panels on at least 200 square feet of roof area. More available square feet and a higher customer budget might result in bigger savings month-over-month, but only a proper energy assessment will determine what numbers work best for each customer. Using the chart below, we can see that with square footage increases, kWh production increases as well:

[image credit solarreviews.com]

So, if we somehow manage to fit 3,000 square feet of solar panels onto this house (wow!!) we would be able to produce 10,000 watts (10 kilowatts). That kind of system is probably not realistic, but it could theoretically be done. Contact us today to learn more about how much energy the right solar power system could produce for you.