The right place to view and assess the cost of solar panels from the range of various companies and providers in a non-biased way is to go to The amazon online marketplace and check out solar panels. Most other sites will tend to favor certain suppliers who give them better commissions. If you ever visit Amazon you can sort by customer ranking and see real solar panel critical reviews that’s an essential tool. It’s important to consider all the added parts into your general solar panel cost calculations. Here are some of the items you will need to install your own solar panel; solar inverter, charge controller, grounding wire, MC cables and the likes.
The price of solar power panels has fallen by over 50% in the last five years and continues to drop due favorable supply and demand business economics for U.S. consumers. Most of the big solar panel manufacturers are in China now and there are also more who considers making solar panels are good business now. This particular boost in production is being fed by the positive demand from customers for cheap solar panels. These is the exact same thing that happened to the computer industry for a decade now. Ten years ago personal computers had been a luxury item only few individuals had, these days all of us have one and price is very cheap. Anyone without internet access these days doesn’t even exist and that’s the way solar panels will be soon too!
In a current market review First Solar reported a major decrease in the price of manufacturing of it’s typical mono crystalline solar power panels at $0.75 per watt. These types of efficiencies are precisely what is driving the prices down for the end consumer. Since the demand for residential solar powered energy increases, economies of scale reduce production costs much more in an exceedingly favorable cycle for customers. You can still find a lot of solar franchisee trying their luck on selling their solar power panel for $5 per watt. Make it a point To not go down this route. You should look to pay no more than $3 per watt at the very most.
To determine the exact worth of solar power systems you’d need for your house you must learn several key concepts and execute a few estimations. The first thing you need to know is how much electricity you need your panels to produce. You will find this information in your power bill, it’ll be stated in kWh (kw hours, 1000 watts over a defined time of one hour).The average U.S. electricity usage is around 10,000 kWh per year or 30kWh per day, so yours should be in the same ball park. The next vital piece of info you will need is your insulation status. Your insulation rating is basically how much solar energy you’ll receive from the sun in your particular area given as kWh per meter squared per day. Luckily for you, this information is freely available at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory internet site. The scale is from 0 – 14 (14 being the most energy). Just about all solar panel systems possess wattages explained at an insulation rating of one. Scoring a 4 means that if your output is 500 watts, your system can actually give you 2kWh per day. The last step is to record for issues in the wiring or inverter. To give you an idea a wiring efficiency is recorded to have no more than 95% and inverters are about 95% as well , worst comes to worst your efficiency is still at 90%. Here’s a working illustration of how to get the cost of solar panel systems if you are living in Florida. Average kWh per residence = 30. Divided by the average annual insulation rating regarding Florida of 3-4 (we will utilize 3 to be safe). This means that we need our system to deliver 10kWh , simply because the necessity is 10kWH per day. At cost per watt of $1 – $3 this provides an entire cost of between $10,000 to $30,000.