Calculator

How to Work Out How Much Solar You Actually Need

Almost everyone approaches this backwards. They see a panel or a power station they
like, buy it, and only afterwards find out whether it does what they hoped. The right
order is the other way around, decide what you need to power first, then find the
product that meets it. That is the whole purpose of the calculator above.

The maths itself is not complicated. Every device you own draws a certain number of
watts. Add up the ones you want to run at the same time, multiply by the number of
hours you need them for, and you have the energy, measured in watt-hours — that your
battery needs to hold. Your solar panel then has to be large enough to put that energy
back in during the hours of sun you get. The calculator does this for you, but it
helps to understand what it is doing, because then you can trust the answer.

What These Numbers Look Like in Real Life

For most households the essential load is smaller than people expect. LED lighting for
a room or two draws around forty watts. Charging phones and a laptop, perhaps twenty.
A fan, somewhere between forty and ninety depending on size. A Wi-Fi router, around
fifteen. Run those together and you are looking at roughly a hundred and fifty watts,
modest, and well within reach of a mid-sized battery topped up by a couple of hundred
watts of solar.

Where the numbers climb sharply is with anything that makes heat or cold. Air
conditioning, water heaters, kettles, ovens, these draw ten or twenty times more than
your lights and phones, and no portable solar setup is going to run them for long. This
is not a limitation of any particular product; it is simply physics. Being clear about
that line, what solar comfortably covers and what it does not, is the single most
useful thing you can understand before you spend any money.

The Middle East Advantage

If you live in the Gulf or the wider region, the sizing works out more favourably for
you than it would almost anywhere else. Five to seven hours of strong, reliable sun a
day means a panel here puts energy back into a battery faster and more consistently
than the same panel would in most of the world. A system that would struggle through a
grey European winter will keep itself topped up here through most of the year. That is
a genuine advantage, and the calculator takes it into account.

Why We Size Honestly

You will find plenty of calculators online that quietly flatter their numbers, sizing
everything a little optimistically so the recommended product looks more capable than
it is. We do the opposite. This tool sizes for essential loads and tells you plainly
what it will and will not run, because a customer who buys the right thing and is happy
is worth far more to us than one who buys on an inflated promise and returns it
disappointed. If the honest answer is that you need a little more capacity than you
hoped, we would rather tell you now than have you find out during a power cut.

Work out your size, see the products that fit, and if you are still unsure, reach out,
we would rather help you get it right than sell you the wrong thing.