Henry Dover answers:

You have not really defined your needs enough to get a good estimate of how much it will cost.

My rough guess would be that you are going to need $10,000 to $30,000 for two pedestal mounted systems.

Note that your not going to generate a large amount of power, it might be enough to run a single family home.

The estimates I was given for my house was $35,000 for a system to generate the power I needed minus my air conditioner. Since I need an air conditioner and my yearly electricity bill is about $1200 I couldn’t justify solar power.

Henry Dover answers:

My Father-in-Law had around 300sqft of solar panels installed for the equivalent of around £3000 or $5000. These were just the cheap and relatively inefficient black plastic tubes that were installed on his roof. This was in South Africa where the labour rates are quite cheap. The system works okay and heats a 40ft x 20ft outdoor pool to over 30C in the height of summer.

Rather than a pool heater, I think it might be good to look at an air source heat pump to help heat the water in Autumn/Winter when you don’t get enough sun to heat the pool. These will be expensive (over $5000), but they will use less than 30% of the electricity of a standard electric water heater.

Just the solar panels could cost you $15-20K including fitting.

Henry Dover answers:

1, 75 watt pannel 400$

http://cgi.ebay.com/SEIMENS-75-watt-solar-panel-pannels-sp-siemens-75w_W0QQitemZ140186330622QQihZ004QQcategoryZ41981QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

divide that into Killowatts and your talking millions of dollars

Henry Dover answers:

The expensive way is to have solar panels make electricity to run an electric heater.

The cheap way is to have panels heat the water directly.

That’s a fairly large pool, but it should work.
Probably not in Alaska in January.
But then, you’re not going to generate any electricity there either.

Henry Dover answers:

I can’t tell whether there are more panels in the system than shown in the picture, but I can see 27 of them.

To get a ballpark figure, I’ll assume the panels are this type http://www.sunelec.com/suntech-solar-panel-190-watts-2600-vmp-p-1668.html at $320 each. This is not at all an unusual price. That’s $8640 for the panels alone (retail price). I would add another $3k for the balance of system, so that’s $12k or so. Labor to install would vary by location. Let’s say $4k. It would be more where prevailing wages or demand are higher, less elsewhere. So that’s $16k.

If in the US, there is a 30% tax credit, so that knocks the price back down to $11k. If you’re lucky enough to live a place like Honolulu, you get an additional 35% incentive, so the net price would be more like $6k.

How long it takes to pay back especially depends on location. In a place where the payback is 20 years or more, a person typically wouldn’t install solar electric. In the Honolulu case, it’s about a 4-year payback.