Great question. How big if your power bill? Use geeky solar people use a measurement of electricity usage called kilowatt hours. We all should have been taught this in grade school, but Shakespeare poems and paper mâché was more important! Everything that you plug into an outlet in your house uses a certain amount of power.
Lets use a toaster for example. 2-splicer, one for each of us. It uses 1000 watts, or 1 kilowatt. A watt is a measurement of power. Use the toaster for a whole hour and you've used up 1 kilowatt hour of electricity. Good news, NB Power just charged you 12.27 cents for that unit. Plus tax. So 14.11 cents. That's right someone just charged you tax to make toast.
So you burnt your toast cause you left it in the toaster for an hour. But that's ok, you're learning about power. Lets math up 1 kilowatt hour (kWHr) to one month. 24 hours in a day - 14.11 cents times 24 hours = 338.64 cents which is $3.39. Multiple that by 30 days = $101.70.
Yay! Now we know what a kWHr is! Check out your power bill and see how many you bought last month. Want to stop buying it from NB Power and start making toast using tax free energy from Mr. Sun? You're in the right place.
Us solar experts have metrics we use to determine how many kilowatt hours that a solar panel can generate in a year in New Brunswick. We take the number of kilowatt hours that you consume in a year and try and match it to the number of kilowatt hours we predict the solar panels will produce. It is usually between 15-30 solar panels to offset the typical power bill.
Fun fact, is is usually most cost effective to reduce your load (the amount of power you use) rather than try to go on the offence and counteract your load with solar. That means if you are running baseboard electric heaters, perhaps you should consider a heat pump to reduce your power bill before ordering up some solar. Many solar companies will not tell you this.
Keep in mind that you don't always have to try and completely offset all of your power bill. Many people might only offset half of it. The return on their investment is still there even if you don't offset your entire load.
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