According to a document published by the U.S. Dept of Energy, the average American household spends at least $2,200 per year on home utility bills, with heating accounting for the biggest portion of these bills. With energy costs set to continue rising, and with heating amounting to around 50% of these costs, householders need to find ways to save on their overall utility expenditure. This article will help you lower energy costs by discovering the benefits of solar energy.
Power Saving Tips
There are many sites online offering a variety of interesting and often quite useful tips for saving power in the home. For example, many appliances today display their Energy Star ratings, and a savvy shopper, looking to update home appliances, will obviously take this into account when making a choice of which system to purchase.
Lighting today, is another area where simply substituting energy saving compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL’s) or better still, LED’s, for older style bulbs throughout the home, can make a substantial difference to energy usage.
At the end of the day, though, the energy source used to power your home has traditionally been from the public power grid, and you have very little control over the tariff levied by your energy supplier. So, using traditional power sources can only give you marginal savings at best, even were you to use the most energy efficient electrical appliances in your home.
Renewable energy sources
With the continued depletion of the traditional fossil fuel supplies, there has been a concerted effort and shift towards finding alternative sources that are economically viable. The list includes, amongst others, wind, water and solar power. The problem is that not all of these are easily or readily available to the average householder.
Wind farms, with hundreds of wind turbines spread over a large area of countryside or suitable ocean sites, are already being used in many countries to supplement the local power grid.
Hydroelectric, or water power, where turbines driven by the flow of water, transfer kinetic into electric energy, has long been used in regions where it suitable water sources are available to generate it.
Both of these power sources, though, are largely out of the range of the majority of people living in the United States.
The tremendous advantages of solar power
When it comes to solar power, however, the story is vastly different. Solar panels, properly installed, on a south facing rooftop, can provide and satisfy most of the energy requirements of a normal home. In fact, with a good installation, it is quite possible to virtually eliminate the dependency on the traditional power grid, with its continuously rising costs.
How many solar panels will I require?
If you want to completely eliminate the need for traditional power supplies, and do away with your monthly electricity bill, you will need to install sufficient solar panel capacity. In order to determine the number of solar panels required, you will need to calculate the power consumption of your home. This is a relatively simple calculation, with all the information you require right there on your monthly electricity and utility bills. Simply put, you need to read off the total kilowatthours of power you have consumed over the past year and apply that to finding the correct system size and number of solar panels needed to generate a similar amount of power for your house.
Is installing solar panels feasible for my home?
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in a report updated in November 2017, the average annual U.S. residential utility customer consumed 10,766 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of 897 kWh per month. Naturally this will vary from region to region, but it gives one a ball park figure to work with.
Naturally the number of panels and the panel sizes required will vary with the output needed, but it is definitely attainable in a normal family home, if correctly installed by a professional installation company, such as Renewable Energy Corporation https://recprd.wpenginepowered.com.
Reasons to install solar panels
With energy prices set to continue increasing, it makes good sense to weigh up the long-term savings you will make by switching away from traditional power sources.
While power grid tariffs have rocketed upwards over the past several years, the price of installing solar panels has fallen by over 70% over the same period, making it a no-brainer when considering making the change.
- Solar panels are long-lasting and require little upkeep.
- They can increase your property value and make mortgage providers more likely to lend.
As a result, those in the know, suggest that investing in solar panels could provide a long-term bonus and addition to regular savings.
Best of all they can provide a substantial tax break!
To encourage the continued expansion of solar installation, federal solar tax breaks and financial incentives are available to make solar more accessible for you as a homeowner. As a result, you can reduce the net cost of your solar panel system by anywhere from 30 to 50 percent.
What is the solar tax credit?
The federal solar tax credit, also known as the investment tax credit (ITC), allows you to deduct 30 percent of the cost of installing a solar energy system from your federal taxes. The ITC also applies to residential systems, and there is no cap on its value. Thanks to the ITC, you, as the average homeowner, would have saved over $5,000 on the cost of going solar in 2017!
The Federal ITC was originally established by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and was set to expire at the end of 2007, but thanks to the spending bill passed by Congress at the end of December 2015, the tax credit is now still available to homeowners in some form through 2021.
When can I claim the tax rebate?
The legislation passed now allows you to claim it as soon as the construction of the system is complete, as long as you have it operational by December 31, 2023.
Even if you don’t have enough tax liability to claim the entire credit in one year, you can roll over the remaining credits into future years for as long as the tax credit is in effect.
The next step is to obtain a free quote!
Our company is dedicated to providing the highest quality solar products and the best customer service in the industry today. We offer reliable, state-of-the-art energy products that decrease your dependence on the main energy grid, lowering your electric bill while reducing your carbon footprint. Contact us today for a free estimate and see for yourself https://recprd.wpenginepowered.com/free-estimate/
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