I would like to take a moment to discuss the overall cost to go full solar powered for you home.
In this example we will use a house that has 2 bedroom 1 bathroom and a washing machine(300 watts). So lets assume you have a standard television which is on average 100 watts a refrigerator (150watts) 5 lights(10 watts each) and a computer( 400 watts). Now we would also have to accomidate for all of your smaller items too wgich will vary from person to person. For this i will use my own personal inventory gor the math. So i also have to add an rv water pump(60 watts) 2 phones(20 watts) a fan(100 watts) and a microwave(1100 watts). For a total of 2300 watts total. Now the thing to remember with this is that you wont use 2300 watts continuously and some of these you may not use at all over the course of the day. For simplicity sake we will just assume you want enough electricity to run all of these continuously as long as the sun is up so you would need 2300 watts worth of solar panels. Depending on where you buy your panels you will pay between $1-$1.50 per watt and since it is alway better to assume the high end plan to spend roughly $3500 on your panels in this scenario ( though you could easily get by on less 500 watts to 1000 watts works for most caravan or tiny house situation). This next part is where it really starts to get complicated and that is determining the size of your battery bank. When i set up my battery bank i was on a strict budget so i use 6 colt golf cart batteries. You can pick up duracell 215 amp hour batteries at your local batteries+ for abou $150 give or take depwnding your state taxes.so expect to pat around $300 per 12 volts. When figuring out how big your bank needs to be you need to k ow the amperage of your apliances with my above set up my tv uses 1.5 amps my computer uses 5 amps and my refrigerator uses 7 amps, the reason i am using these items is because they are the most used and make the biggest impact on my batteries. So if all three of these are running constantly they are drawing 13.5 amps per hour which in theory i can rum for 15 hours straight however it is never good to run your batteries below 50% charge which will lower your time to 7.5 hours of battery life. This would be enough to run at night but you are going to want enough to account for days without sunlight. So if you want to plan for 3 days with no sun then take your time you can run and devide by 72 so lets say tpu round up to 75. You would need 10 time as much storage as tou have now or 20 6 volt batteries this will run you around $3000 you can lower this cost by deciding what you consider to be nessecary and removing but we are using these number for simplicity sake. So to summarise the initial coat of going solar will be between $6000 and $7000 depending on your charge controller wich we will cover in the next. Installment