Making the switch to solar energy is something that every person should do, but something that holds many people back is the fact that they believe it is something that is too expensive to get started with. You’re going to discover that there are many different sorts of costs involved when you decide to switch over to solar energy, but you need to also understand that these costs can be reduced every once in a while.

As you continue to read you’re going to find that we will be talking about the expenses needed in order to get started using this type of solar energy.

Get a Complete System

While many people wind up going out and purchasing everything separately you’ll find that they do sell complete systems to make sure people have everything they need to get started. You’re still going to need to purchase batteries separately, because this is how you’ll store the energy, so even if they say they are a complete solar panel kit you ought to keep this in mind. If you end up building a large solar panel system you are going to need far more batteries than if you decide to just create a smaller solar panel system. The batteries run about $100 apiece, and you are going to want to ensure that you are purchasing deep cycle batteries, these can be bought in an auto parts store.

What Size Do You Need

While purchasing a whole system is something which can be extremely useful, often they are much more expensive than buying the items separately and you are able to invest upwards to $19,000 on one of these ready to go systems. If you would like to buy your solar power panels separately you’ll discover that you can purchase three or four, 100 watts each panel’s for about $1000.

For those people that are just looking to cut their electricity costs or power their house if they have a little home and they are the only ones living there, 3 or 4 solar panels should be more than enough panels. But for those who have a four bedroom home and have four or five men and women living in your house, you might discover that you’ll need a larger solar panel system made up of 10 or 20 solar panels.

After you have your solar panels and batteries you will need a few other a items so as to make your system complete and that would be a power inverter as well as a charge controller. It’s not possible to come up with an actual cost for the power inverter mainly because there are lots of different sizes and the larger the inverter you need the more money you will need to pay for it.

The Cost

For those of you who shop around and search for the best deals you are going to discover that a small solar panel system of three or four panels will only end up costing you $1000 to $1500. You ought to also keep in mind that it may be very expensive if this is something that you need to have somebody else install for you, and this would be an added expense on top of your initial investment.