Solar Panel Setup

You don't say if you will be off-grid or just want to be carbon-neutral or cost neutral?  That's key to your way ahead because, in addition to all the other good advice other members have provided here, don't overlook the fact that you'll be generating power off of your panels when you're out that you can feed into the grid and then draw some of it back out in the evening.  You'll pay more for your grid electricity that you get when you feed it in but the ongoing cost of that is quite likely to be cheap in comparison to the current high capital cost of batteries, invertors, Etc.  You can re-address that side of it as the cost of equipment eventually falls.


When calculating your loads, take into consideration that your high-load devices (washing machines, cookers, iron, etc) are running for a relatively small duration.  Change of lifestyle can also affect the end sum, e.g. we used to put the dishwasher on overnight, now we always put it on in the morning when the sun has fully risen onto our East-facing panels.  We also reduce our max load by running other high-load devices one at a time, example, boil kettle first then turn on grill for toast (or vice versa) so that we are making the most of our self-generated power and drawing as little as possible from the grid.  Also, regarding device load plates, they will always give you the worst case load that they are designed to cope with, e.g. items with pumps or motors are only drawing their worst case load in the first few seconds (or even milliseconds) of start-up phase before the load drops considerably but ovens, etc. will be slightly different.  All of that said, the best advice given above is that you will only get a fraction of your 4kw from 4kw of panels except on a small number of exceptionally few days when you have the sun perfectly orthogonal to your panels on a clear day


Finally, look at this website which contains a wealth of useful information including the available power at your given latitude, longitude and time of year. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/pvgis Something I have found very interesting is the difference in power if you have actively trackiing solar panels instead of the usual fixed roof panels - it's about 50% higher.  Is it worth the additional cost of the panel tracking system?  That's something I'm working on!!

You don't say if you will be off-grid or just want to be carbon-neutral or cost neutral?  That's key to your way ahead because, in addition to all the other good advice other members have provided here, don't overlook the fact that you'll be generating power off of your panels when you're out that you can feed into the grid and then draw some of it back out in the evening.  You'll pay more for your grid electricity that you get when you feed it in but the ongoing cost of that is quite likely to be cheap in comparison to the current high capital cost of batteries, invertors, Etc.  You can re-address that side of it as the cost of equipment eventually falls.


When calculating your loads, take into consideration that your high-load devices (washing machines, cookers, iron, etc) are running for a relatively small duration.  Change of lifestyle can also affect the end sum, e.g. we used to put the dishwasher on overnight, now we always put it on in the morning when the sun has fully risen onto our East-facing panels.  We also reduce our max load by running other high-load devices one at a time, example, boil kettle first then turn on grill for toast (or vice versa) so that we are making the most of our self-generated power and drawing as little as possible from the grid.  Also, regarding device load plates, they will always give you the worst case load that they are designed to cope with, e.g. items with pumps or motors are only drawing their worst case load in the first few seconds (or even milliseconds) of start-up phase before the load drops considerably but ovens, etc. will be slightly different.  All of that said, the best advice given above is that you will only get a fraction of your 4kw from 4kw of panels except on a small number of exceptionally few days when you have the sun perfectly orthogonal to your panels on a clear day


Finally, look at this website which contains a wealth of useful information including the available power at your given latitude, longitude and time of year. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/pvgis Something I have found very interesting is the difference in power if you have actively trackiing solar panels instead of the usual fixed roof panels - it's about 50% higher.  Is it worth the additional cost of the panel tracking system?  That's something I'm working on!!