How much does it cost to install residential solar power panels?”
The main advantage of having a professional solar panel installation is that it is worry free. A professional will come to your home and talk with you about your solar needs and together you will decide how much to spend to completely outfit your home. He will do all the labor (at a cost or course) and you won’t need to do anything but pay him. The disadvantage of this scenario is that it will cost up to $20,000 for an average size home. If you have the income to spare this is an ideal way to get into utililizing solar power in your home.
Because of my engineering background and my interest in the topic of renewable energy, people sometimes ask me how much it would cost to install enough photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to generate all of one’s own electrical energy. There are websites to help with this, but they can sometimes be confusing unless you’re a technologist so I’ve developed some simple guidelines that will help to put a PV solar system’s cost in perspective. In the U.S., a rule-of-thumb is that an average house consumes electricity at the rate of 1 kW. Since there are about 730 hours in each month and the average price of a kW-hour of electricity is about $.10, an average monthly electric bill should be around $73 for 730 kWh of electricity. I will say that this can vary considerably if you have some non-standard items like a hot-tub or some electrical appliances running continuously. It will also increase significantly in months when you run an air conditioning unit. The cost of electricity varies widely acro
