People often say that the electricity generated by solar panels is enough to power everything in your home. However, air conditioning presents an independent challenge – it is the most energy-efficient appliance in the home. Consider adding an AC device to your home and would like to know if it is possible to run it using solar energy?

In this article, we will explore how much energy it actually requires and how many solar panels are needed to regularly generate this quantity.

Air conditioning equipment accounts for 20% of your household’s energy consumption

The exact energy consumption largely depends on the size and type of air conditioning equipment you choose. The cooling capacity of an air conditioner is to some extent converted into its wattage, as shown below:

1 ton of refrigeration power requires slightly more than 1000 W. It can handle the central air conditioning system of the entire house using approximately 3500W. A medium-sized air conditioning device requires approximately 1000-1500 watts of power. The power of small devices used in small rooms can reach 500 watts.

To obtain the daily energy consumption of communication devices, you need to multiply their wattage by the estimated working time. However, the entire calculation became chaotic because:

The presence of people and animals in the room where air conditioning equipment is working will increase its energy consumption.

Air conditioning attempts to cool every item in the room: the more things around it, the higher the power consumption.

The air conditioning system requires additional energy to start working, but the energy required to maintain the required temperature afterwards is much less than the actual cooling of the air.

Therefore, it is sometimes recommended to halve the calculated energy. What you will ultimately receive is the additional electricity that the solar panels need to generate every day to support your air conditioning system.

To understand the principle, let’s consider the simplest scenario: air conditioning and solar panels working simultaneously. In this case, we only need to divide the electricity consumption of the AC device by the wattage of the solar panel. For example, four 300 W solar panels are sufficient to support a 1200 W air conditioning system.