I have recently purchased a home with solar panels. The previous owner didn't have a ton of information on them as she inherited the house from her mother who passed away. She has the purchase agreement, but the company that did the installation in 2014 has gone bankrupt (in 2020).
I'd like to somehow figure out how much energy I'm getting out of the panels. I got information from the previous owner on their electric bill, which shows me I won't be paying much. But that doesn't really answer my question about electricity generation.
Looks like I have 14 solar world Mono Black panels with model number 275.
Any advice on how I can go about figuring out exactly how much energy generation I'm getting?
Ancillary Information: the panels are owned outright. They were originally purchased with cash so no loan or lease on them.
Looks like the model name is the wattage. Your panels are each making a max of 275w. With 14 of them, the max power they will generate is 3850w, or 3.8Kw. That's a pretty small solar deployment, about 1/4th the size of a array intended to provide full power to a US home. Still nice to have, but sized more to offset power costs than to eliminate them.
That means if you have one hour of full sunlight hit your panels, it will generate 3.8kw of power. If you go to this site it will estimate how many sunlight hours your roof will get per year. Multiple the sunlight hours by 3.8Kw to find your total possible power generation per year.
To find out how much you'll save, you need to know how much a Kwh costs from your local power company, likely between $0.10-$0.30/kwh.
So just with made up totals, if you get 1000hrs of sunlight/yr, you will generate up to 3,895kwh. At $0.10/kwh, you'll save $389.50/yr.
I think you mean kWh of energy, not kW of power, since you multiplied it by time.
Thank you! This is very comprehensive. I have a place to start now.
Glad to help. I've been investigating my own solar install, so have been digging into the specifics a lot.
Note that the above are the "best case" numbers. Panels can put out less power for lots of reasons. They tend to lose a little bit of efficiency when they get older. Think 1%/year, but that's just a rule of thumb. Being dirty can affect them, cloud cover, angle and position, and hilariously counterintuitively, if they get too much sun. Solar panels get less efficient the hotter they are, so an especially sunny day will lower the power output.
Leads to some complex effort to optimize, but honestly its power that just hits your house for free. That's a fine thing in any circumstance.