Cost Of Solar Power

Once you have your solar panels or solar array in place, the cost of solar power is zero. it is the eqipment that costs the money. Once installed there are no maintenance costs associated with solar panels and they are presumed to last for 25 years. Therefore, the actual cost of solar power, if you want to term it like that is very low indeed. If you build your own solar panels then the cost of solar power is even lower.

Cost Of Solar Power

We would all like to come off the electricity grid wouldn't we, but people are unsure of the cost of solar power. There just is not a lot of information around about the true cost of solar power.

There were a few surveys done in the UK earlier this year and it seems that the average cost of a system which could take a whole house off grid would be about $35,000. That is for shop-bought equipment installed by professionals. The UK is expensive for most things, so you might get it cheaper wherever you live, but it is still a huge amount of money.

These systems are designed to last 25 years, so it looks like you would make savings of about $300 a year from day one. This is not bad and the government is offering handsome subsidies for qualifying installations.

Still, not many working class families have that sort of money lying fallow. So what is the alternative? How could you bring the cost of solar power down? Well, the obvious answer is to make your own solar panels and install them yourself too.

it is all right, you do not have to be a technician, an engineer or an electrician to be able to make a solar panel and the components are available from any good hobbyist or DIY store locally.

The trick to making your own solar panels is to get a good set of working plans. The schematic diagrams or drawings are available on this site by clicking the advert to the right of this article.

Once you have the plans the cost of solar power comes right down. In fact the cost of one solar panel will fall to about $200, but it could be even less, perhaps half that, if you are lucky or you buy enough equipment to make two or three panels at a time.

One panel could half your electricity bills, but it could take two or more, because different houses have different equipment in them and different numbers of people at home all the time. One panel will provide about 100 Kw and should pay for itself within a month. Looking at it from this perspective, if you made one panel a week for a month, you should be off grid and making money within that month.

Not that it takes a week to make a solar panel. More like a morning. Then you will see that the cost of solar power is zero. Even if your panels only last ten years and not 25 years, you have still saved 240 months of electricity bills for the cost of $800 or less. The cost of solar power can actually be less that nothing.