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This simulator will help you decide whether or not to install solar panels at home

Putting solar panels in homes has become a necessity. Due to the high price of electricity, putting solar panels can mean reducing the electricity rate by up to 60%, although everything will depend on your consumption habits. While before it took about 10 years to amortize the cost of installing the panels in our homes, with the increase in the price of electricity, this amortization period is becoming much shorter. Today in RedesZone we are going to show you the main simulator that exists so that you can decide if it will be worth putting solar panels or not.

Solar generation simulator

On the official website of the European Commission there is a completely free simulator, this simulator will allow us to know with certain accuracy what our annual and monthly production of solar panels will be. Depending on the kWp installed in our home, the orientation of our roof, the type of technology of the photovoltaic panels and other variables, it will give us a fairly detailed production in kWh, to get an idea of ​​whether or not it is worth installing them in Our home.

The first thing we have to do is access this simulator from the following button:

Once we are inside, we can position ourselves where the house is where we want to put solar panels. It is very important to put the geolocation, the sun that we have in the north of Spain is not the same as in the south of Spain. Once the location is selected, we will have to choose the following parameters:

  • Solar radiation database: we choose the one that comes by default, PVGIS-SARAH2.
  • solar panel technology: we choose the material of our solar panels, they are generally “Monocrystalline Silicon”.
  • installed peak power: this is the peak power that our photovoltaic installation will have, in our case we have installed 4.55kWp in our home.
  • system loss: it is a value that we can put the one that is already predetermined.

Another very important information is to choose the position of the plates, it is essential that the orientation is correct, otherwise we could lose up to 50% of the annual production:

  • slope: is the angle of inclination of the plates (the slope). Generally the roofs are inclined about 30º or 35º approximately, we must put this value.
  • Azimuth: if you select 0 it is the perfect south, in the help you have the values ​​that you must put. To know the orientation of your roof, all you need is a smartphone with a compass and point to where our roof ends.

Other values ​​that you can put is “optimize the slope”, to know what the perfect slope would be. We can also choose to optimize the slope and azimuth, as long as you have the possibility to modify the orientation of the plates with respect to the roof.

Once you have completed all this, we click on the “Visualize Results” button, although we can also download the data in CSV or JSON for later analysis.

In the lower part, a small summary of everything we have entered will appear, with its corresponding loss, orientation of the plates, etc. It tells us that we will be able to generate up to 7200kWh in our photovoltaic installation. The expected production will also appear month after month, logically we must take into account that the days of clouds, rains etc. production will be clearly lower, it is an approximation of what can be expected. As you can see, the loss between summer and winter is around 40% approximately, something you should take into account.

In case you are interested in mounting batteries, we also have a small simulator to know if it is worth it or not. A few years ago, mounting 5kWh or 10kWh batteries in our home was almost never profitable, but with the rise in the price of electricity, the truth is that it is becoming more and more profitable in the long term. In this simulator you will be able to carry out a simulation of what is expected.

Thanks to this simulator, you can begin to assess whether or not it is worth installing solar panels. Logically, if you decide to install solar panels you should try to make all your electricity consumption for the day, that is, washing machine, dishwasher, oven and other high consumption appliances. At night, the usual thing is to spend approximately 2kWh without putting the AC or any high-consumption appliance. In the case of installing batteries, you could consume almost 0kWh from the electrical network, because at night our house will draw on this battery automatically.

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