I know very little about in-depth electrical work so I would definitely need professional electrician assistance, but I am looking for a sort of “how to disconnect from the power company” and go full solar? I understand that it’s becoming much less expensive to purchase and maintain, and I would like to free myself from $300/month electrical payments on my residence.
If it helps, I live in the mideast USA.
Any help is really appreciated! :)
Are you talking about disconnecting power entirely, or just generating as much as possible yourself?
Because the first, depending on local laws, is going to be something you can’t necessarily do and keep your occupancy permit and be allowed to stay living in the house.
The other is going to be a matter of figuring out your maximum power requirements and sizing a solar and battery system big enough to fill your needs.
Just as a thing to consider: you’re talking tens and tens of thousands of hardware if your power bill is $300 a month, and the ROI on this is going to be 10 or 20 years, so if you’re not living there that long, it’s maybe not worth doing.
Do the math on how much power you use at peak draw, how much power you use in a month, and how big of a system you’d need to generate enough power, and how many batteries you’d need to store your non-solar needs (days with lower production, no production, overnight, etc.).
(Edit) Meant to give example numbers for what I did in 2022. I ended up spending about $11,000 on the solar panels themselves, and the batteries would have been ~$23,000, for a monthly peak usage of about 1500kwh.
I did not spend $23,000 on batteries, because that would have been (and the math has tracked afterwards) more than a decade payback time, which was longer than the manufacturer specs indicated that I could expect the batteries to last.
I’m sure prices have decreased some in the last 2 years, but solar panels aren’t too badly priced, but the rest of the storage stuff around it was just a bit too expensive to make any real sense unless I was somewhere doing the no-grid life, which isn’t the case here.
Extremely helpful, thank you so much! It seems what I might be looking for is more along the lines of using the panels as a compliment to lower my bill overall, at least, from what I understand.
I live on a cruising sailboat and have bought gear from Sun Electronics in Miami Lakes, Fl a few times.
They’ll sell you A panel or pallet after pallet of every conceivable type and manufacturer and power rating. There is no sales tax in Florida on anything having to do with solar power, so that could also save you some money.
Here they have several examples of complete systems to give you an idea / crash course of what’s involved.
These are examples, and as you start to learn more about the different components and choices (lead acid vs LifePo4 batteries, or home built or store bought, EV powerwall, etc etc) you’ll see your prices change.
I’m not affiliated, just a happy customer.
You might want to first identify your main power consumption and at what time this occurs. 300$ seems very high in general, but if that is for example mostly AC usage during the day, you might be able to not have to buy as large of a battery since peak consumption coincidences with peak production.
