How much solar power and how many solar panels do I need?

If you are just starting out on your solar journey, you may be wondering how many solar panels you need?

As a guide, we install 1kW of solar panels for 3kWhs of electricity used. 1kW equals roughly 3 solar panels.

There is of course, much more to it than that. A good place to start is looking at your power bill to see how much electricity you are using. With most retailers, they have a little chart on the bill somewhere which shows how much electricity you use at different times of the year.

The images above show an example of an Origin bill which gives quite detailed information about how this customer uses electricity. For more tips on understanding your energy bill, click here.

Using the example above, this customer is quite a high user of electricity so would require more solar panels than most homes. This customer is using approximately 35kWhs of electricity per day. So, using the rule above, where we install 1kW of solar power for every 3kWhs of energy used, we would install an 11.66kW system.

You can check you power bill and use this basic equation to work out a roughly how many solar panels you will need.

Here is a guide to how many solar panels and what size solar system you will need, based on your usage:

Please treat this data is a really approximate guide, and you can find more information about what solar system you need here. You will also need to consider: