Apparently, there's a lot of math needed to figure out exactly how many panels you need for your house. But don't worry, in this video I'm going to walk you through the process step by step, and it's going to be a lot easier than you think.

The number of solar panels you need can vary quite a bit, depending on a lot of different factors, not just the manufacturer and the brand and the specific model of the panels themselves. A lot of this depends on your own specific energy consumption needs, as well as things like where your house is in the world, what direction it faces, things like that. These all play a part in figuring out how many solar panels you need.

Also, if you want your solar panels to provide 100% of the power for your home, there are some other things you need to keep in mind as well. So be sure to stick to the end of the video, and I'll have some other tips for you on that as well. All right, so to really understand how many solar panels you need, we need to have three numbers. First, the first one is we need to know how much power your home uses every day. Second, we need to understand how many peak sun hours your house gets.

And this is going to depend greatly on where your house is located in the world. And in this specific video, we're going to focus on the United States. And then last but not least, we need to know how much energy the solar panels produce. All right, so first let's tackle how much power your home uses per day. And don't worry, we're going to have examples as we go along here.

So even if you don't like math, this is going to be really easy to follow. In order to find out this information, you need a copy of your last month's utility bill. Ideally, you would want the last twelve months worth of utility bills, because that'll help you average how much your energy consumption is throughout the entire year, depending on different seasons and peak energy use and things like that. If you have an entire year's worth of information, then you can average that out and we can get a more accurate number. But if you only have the last month's information, that's fine as well.

You can still do the math here. Sometimes you can log into your energy company's portal as well, and you can get your energy bills on that. So once you have your bill, you want to look for the number of kilowatt-hours used, or kWh or something like that. That's the number that you'll need to reference or to be able to add up over the last twelve months. If you don't have the number of kilowatt- hours used, look for the beginning and the end meter readings, and then you'll be able to subtract the beginning meter reading from the end meter reading to see how much power in kilowatt-hours you used in the last month.

All right, so let's run through an example here. So this is a download from the information from an energy company's website, and this is the last twelve months worth of information. All we have to do here is add up the number of kilowatt-hours used every month to get a total of 17,484 kilowatt-hours for the entire year. Then we just need to divide that by 365 days, and that will give us a total of 47.9 kilowatt hours used per day. And that's going to be the average, like I said, depending on how much energy you use per day.

And it's going to vary quite a bit depending on the seasons and different situations. So in this example, 47.9 is the number of kilowatt-hours you use every day. And if you don't have an entire year's worth of information on this, that's okay, too. Don't divide it by 365, though. Just divide the last utility bill by 30, and that will give you your daily number.

Next, we need to figure out how many peak hours, or sometimes it's called the irradiance value of your house. And all this really means is how many number of peak sun hours you get per day on average throughout the year. So accounting for winter and summer and all these things, how many hours of sunlight does your house get at basically full force, right. So in this case, in the United States, the number is going to be between 6 and 4, roughly. But to get a more accurate value, I'm going to have a map that shows up here with some information.

Here, you can kind of figure out roughly where your house is located in the United States and then map this back to the exact value that you need to use. That will give you the most accurate information. If you don't want to do that, then you could just use the value of 4 as kind of a default that will get you in the ballpark of where you want to be with this. And in fact, in our example, our number is four. So that's what we're going to use.

Now, the last number we need in this equation is how many Watts each solar panel produces. This is, again, going to vary greatly depending on the manufacturer and the model of the solar panel that you're looking at. It could be anywhere from about 150 Watts per panel to around 425 Watts per panel. And if you don't know exactly what you're looking at right now, that's okay. I would probably go ahead and plug in about 400 Watts just so that way we can do some easy math and figure out a rough estimate as to how many panels you need.

And 400 Watts just so happens to be the number that we're going to use in this example. So that's what we'll plug in here.

All right, so now that we have all these numbers, we can plug them into an equation and figure out how many solar panels you need. All right, so here's the formula. So what we're going to do is we're going to just plug these numbers in one at a time.

First, we'll plug in the number that we have in our example of 47.9 kilowatt-hours in the daily section. Next, we know how many average sun hours we have, and that's 4. So we'll put those here for the peak solar hours. And last but not least, we will put in 400 for the solar panel Watt rating. And that will give us this equation of 47.9 kilowatt-hours divided by 4 times 400.

All right, so first we need to tackle the four times 400 Watts here. So this is going to come out to a total of 1600 Watts. Then we need to take that 1600 Watts and divide it by 1000. And that will give us the total number of kilowatt-hours. So that leaves us with 47.9 kilowatt-hours divided by one six kilowatt-hours.

And that will give us finally the number of panels needed. And in this example, it's 30 panels. It's slightly under that amount. But I rounded up to be sure that everything's covered. We would need 30, 400 Watt panels to be able to supply 100% of our energy needs for our house.

Now while I tried to make this math as simple as possible, there are still other factors that you need to consider as well. If you're looking at solar for your whole house, things like whether or not you want to replace all of your energy bill with solar panels, or if you just want to replace part of it or most of it with solar energy, whether or not you want to be able to sell the energy back to the energy company, if you produce too much energy. So more energy than your home actually needs, whether or not you want to be able to sell that back to the electricity company, actually get a check from them every month. And there are other factors as well, such as whether or not your house actually gets shade that could obstruct some of the solar efficiency of your panels and how steep your roof is. All these things play a role in getting an exact number of how many panels you need for your house.

So to make this somewhat complicated process a lot easier, I highly recommend that you talk to someone who actually can give you a comprehensive picture of what it would look like specifically for your house and for your goals, whether or not you need all the panels that I talked about in this video, or whether or not you need fewer panels, or if you have other things that you would need to consider that we really don't cover in this, but that would absolutely play a role. There are companies that can do quotes online. You don't have to necessarily have someone come out to your house to be able to do this. They can pull up your house through a satellite image, they can go over everything with you typically like through a Zoom call for example. So they can give you a really clear, comprehensive picture of what it would look like to have whole house, home solar at your house. So if you're interested in doing that I've teamed up with a company called SunPower.

They're actually the oldest solar panel company in the United States and they're, I think the only company that's been around longer than their warranty. So if you're interested in understanding what this will look like for your house I'll have a link in the description below where you can go and contact them and they can do everything like I talked about. They can give you an online consultation and go over all of your goals and give you a really clear picture of what it would look like to have solar at your house. Thanks for watching this video. Hopefully you found it helpful if you did don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel and I will see you in the next one.