19/05/2023
How many solar panels are needed for a house?
The average one-bedroom house needs six solar panels, a typical three-bedroom house requires 10 panels, and a five-bedroom house will usually need 14 panels.
These solar arrays will generate roughly the same amount of electricity that each household uses in a typical year.
Annual electricity usage is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh).
1 kWh is how much electricity it would take to run a 1,000 watt (1 kW) appliance for an hour – so for example, if you had a 500 watt dishwasher, you would use 0.5 kWh in an hour of use.
In each case, the panels will produce enough electricity to cover around 50% of a household's annual usage – or more, if you don’t leave the house very often.
Without a solar battery or connected immersion heater around half of this energy will go unused by your home, because you won’t always be there to use it when it’s generated.
Not to worry, though – you can sell this extra power back to the National Grid via the Smart Export Guarantee.
The savings you’ll gain from the SEG and from not having to pay for expensive National Grid electricity mean you’ll typically break even in less than 9 years.
