After getting estimates from several local contractors, I can't justify the cost of taking the entire house solar - especially since we're considering moving in a few years and solar power would price the house out of the market for its size.
In the meantime, though, is there a way to route solar power to one high-use appliance - say our PC or our TV - without fully rewiring the house? This would incur some savings and a lower cost, and we might be able to see some return on investment when we sell the house.|||Not very practical if you ask me. the way the solar system works in a nutshell. Panels turn sunlight into DC electricity, think the battery in your car. then an inverter is installed, which turns the DC into AC, which is what is used in your house. The system feeds your needs when the sun is out, and any excess produced during the day turns your meter backward, and at night you draw from your power company. To do for a single outlet, it would work during the day, but at night or if it got cloudy you would have to move the power cord,to the other outlet hooked to your regular power. If you put solar on your house it might make a great selling point, when you show the new potential owners your electricity bills, depending where you live, it could be close to ZERO for the year.|||Yes you can.
A PC or TV are low power devices and one or the other may actually be able to be powered by PV solar panels for a short periods of time.
You will never see a return on your investment(as things currently stand), and will not be a selling feature for future buyers of your property.
My advice would be to save your money for now and invest on better insulation to reduce energy losses.
In 10 or 15 years, it may be a totally different story, but it is not currently a viable alternative.
Good luck.|||Same way you would with a backup generator, you decide which circuits to move to a different circuit breaker panel and have a transfer switch install so that second panel can be switched between grid power and whatever else you want whether it's from a solar powered inverter or a generator. However, a better approach is simply to get a grid tied system and handle everything in the accounting with the power company.|||You can, but it is probably not worth it. By removing certain circuits off the grid, you would need to provide enough storage (batteries) to provide all of the power you need for it, even after a stretch of bad weather. Batteries need to be maintained and replaced eventually, adding to the cost over the lifetime of the system.
The good news is there are now microinverters for about $250 that convert the DC from each panel into AC right up on the roof. The nice thing about this is there used to be limits to how small of a system you could connect directly to the grid, making a small entry level system impossible. Now that limit is one panel. You can install a 200W panel and a microinverter if that's how small you want to get. However, the output of it would be tiny, barely noticeable in the grand scheme of things, so while you would be generating your own electricity, and offsetting some of your usage, it wouldn' t be much, maybe 20kwh a month. But, if you get 5 of them, now we're up to 1000W, that's not too bad, around 100kwh per month, but still a relatively inexpensive system. You can also get 30% of the installed cost back in a federal tax credit.
http://www.altestore.com/store/Inverters鈥?/a>|||If your interest is in saving money, it's really unlikely that you can do that with a small system, and even with a large system, it would be hard to get your money back if you're moving in a few years. Sorry. Conservation measures like energy efficient lighting and appliances, insulation, attic fan instead of A/C, however, could pay for themselves in that short time.
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