How to Calculate My Power Requirements for Solar Power
When thinking about converting a home from conventional electricity to solar power, the first point of confusion is figuring out how much solar power is needed to power everything in your home. There are several ways you can calculate your personal power requirements, but it's important to know that these calculations can only be guidelines instead of hard-and-fast rules.
Most electrical appliances vary the amount of energy they're using based on the time of day, specific settings, the appliance brand, how hot or cold an environment they are in and more. A refrigerator uses more electricity in a hot room, for example, or if it's opened several times an hour all day long.
Solar power is also not a consistent source of specific amounts of power. On bright sunny days you may get 90 percent of the rated power from your panels, while other days you may only get 50 percent or less because of heavy cloud cover.
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Instructions
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All appliances and electronic devices that use electricity have a power usage rating noted on them somewhere, and the formula for figuring out how much power is need to run a given device is amps x volts = watts.
A laptop computer has the power rating noted on the adapter for example, but a desktop computer or TV could have the power rating on a label stuck to the side, bottom or back of the unit. Some desktop computers even have the label inside the case on the internal power supply.
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Find the power rating label for each electric device, appliance or gadget in your home. Some appliances tell you exactly how many watts the device uses, but most give you only amps and volts instead. You may also find some that give the amps only. Multiply amps and volts to find the watts, and in cases where you have amps only, multiply those times 120 because that is the standard volts in American electrical plugs.
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List the total watts for each appliance and electronic device you have--including all light bulbs, alarm clocks and miscellaneous small devices--then total them. This total provides you with the amount of solar power you'll need as a minimum to continue running everything in your household with no reductions or energy-efficiency improvements.
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Tips & Warnings
You can use a current electric bill to calculate your general electrical use as well. Look at your current electric bill to see how many watt or kilowatt-hours you used in that month. A kilowatt-hour is 1,000 watts in an hour. Use that calculation to determine the amount of equivalent solar power needed for your home.
It's important to know that successfully converting to using solar power for electricity is usually a combined effort involving reducing energy consumption and converting to much more efficient appliances. That way you're able to lower your solar power requirements dramatically and can save quite a bit of money on the final solar panel installation.
Many electrical devices tell you how much power they use at maximum, but that's not the same as how much they use regularly. An air conditioner may use 1,500 watts when the compressor and fan are on but just 300 or 500 watts when it's not actively cooling or blowing the air.
