Power Your Home With Photo-Electric
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Yes, solar energy can power your entire home. Although it sounds complicated and expensive, such a system is relatively simple in concept. Solar panels lined with polycrystalline silicon, which reacts to sunlight by generating a small electrical charge, are linked together on a roof or on open land facing the sun. As the sunlight is converted to electricity, the DC current generated is sent to an inverter, which converts the DC current to AC power. This AC power feeds into your main electrical service panel, where it is used to power all the devices in your home—just like utility company electricity. Through the use of transfer switches and other safety devices, your clean, renewable power source is capable of powering your home, cabin, tool shed, or any other building for that matter.
In most locations, the utility companies now will meter your home in a manner that keeps track of the energy you are generating yourself, giving you credit for that usage and even paying you back when the power grid is making use of the energy you generate. If you are entirely “off-the-grid,” you can install a large bank of batteries to store energy for use at night or on cloudy days or rig your system with a backup generator that kicks in when there is no sunlight to power your home.
It is no small undertaking to install a whole-house photo-electric panel system, but looking at the roofs on a drive through most neighborhoods in the U.S. will show that it no longer a rarity, either. Lining your roof with photo-electric solar panels is not cheap. The average installation cost for a 5 kW system is $25,000 to $35,000. However, subsidies and rebates can cut this cost by 50 percent. And statistics show that the average payback period necessary to recoup your investment through energy cost savings is only 6 to 8 years. After that point, your household electricity is utterly free.
Source: The Spruce
