Thanks to the post here and the helpful guys over at TreeHugger.com (forum post), I’m pretty sure I’ve now got a good idea on how to price and size my solar install. I even know that I know want a “Grid-Tied” some system and not a total off the grid solution with solar contribution a % to our energy needs and not the majority.

Solar Map

There are some great stats out there about sun time indexes etc etc to help you work this out and basically I know roughly that where we are gets 3.5 hours of sunlight a day and from that you can see that with the lowest price kit from MrSolar.com that the CE8 would generate an expected 1.91kWH of electricity over the month so we now need to know what our energy consumption would be. But a quick cost guide (in US$) looks something like this :

Based on 3.5Hrs of sun per day average
1.91kWh Kit cost $11,150 – CE8 Kit
2.86kWh Kit cost $16,000 – CE12 Kit
5.72kWh Kit cost $30,000 – CE24 Kit
8.58kWh Kit cost $59,500 – CE36 Kit

Now of course if you get more or less sun the kWh / $ figures would change if you are trying to work out per unit but the kit cost is the same. For instance the CE8 kit given 6Hrs of sunlight per day can produce 3.27kWH of energy so it really depends how much sun you get.

For this reason we’ll be looking to add something like the CE8 and use it to “top up” our electricity supply until we get a good idea of our energy consumption.

South Facing Roof @ 45Degrees

It’s worth noting that the 8/12/24/36 in the kit name is the number of panels supplied and with each panel coming in at 99.4cm x 164cm we’d be looking at an install of 4mx3, (approx) so you really will need to room and we hope that the grange has enough space to make it viable.

You can see the PDFs of the kit here :
Panel PDF , Inverter , AC Disconnect