Saturday, September 6, 2008

Solar Cell to your Home

Do you have any idea how solar cell can save the earth and bankrupt you? lol.
Please see from howstuffworks below.

To calculate how many square inches of solar panel you need for a house, you need to know:
How much power the house consumes on average.
Where the house is located (so you can calculate mean solar days, average rainfall, etc.). This question is impossible to answer unless you have a specific location in mind. We'll assume that on an average day the solar panels generate their maximum power for 5 hours.
The first question is actually pretty interesting, so let's work on it.
A "typical home" in America can use either electricity or gas to provide heat -- heat for the house, the hot water, the clothes dryer and the stove/oven. If you were to power a house with solar electricity, you would certainly use gas appliances because solar electricity is so expensive. This means that what you would be powering with solar electricity are things like the refrigerator, the lights, the computer, the TV, stereo equipment, motors in things like furnace fans and the washer, etc. Let's say that all of those things average out to 600 watts on average. Over the course of 24 hours, you need 600 watts * 24 hours = 14,400 watt-hours per day.

From our calculations and assumptions above, we know that a solar panel can generate 70 milliwatts per square inch * 5 hours = 350 milliwatt hours per day. Therefore you need about 41,000 square inches of solar panel for the house. That's a solar panel that measures about 285 square feet (about 26 square meters). That would cost around $16,000 right now. Then, because the sun only shines part of the time, you would need to purchase a battery bank, an inverter, etc., and that often doubles the cost of the installation.

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