How Nigerians can reduce their electricity bills with a Solar Powered inverter system

Posted by Felix Okoli on Thursday October 15, 2015 at 17:45:16:

As the world keeps on developing, more and more electrical energy consuming devices will be used and this eventually keeps on raising the demand for electricity which ultimately raises it price in the market. Wouldn't it be better if people could control how much they spend on electricity?

In a fast developing African nation like Nigeria for instance where there is no 24 hr electricity supply yet but rather power rationing, the power generation companies and the government already have plans to increase the price of electricity supplied to consumers so that those power companies may remain profitable. With the way I see it, electricity prices will keep rising until when supply starts to match demand for it in the country and that may not come soon. The people who will end up suffering the most are the end users or electricity consumers who have to pay their bills on a monthly basis.

There had already been a lot of complaints by electricity consumers in Nigeria n the past as a result of rising energy bulls. While many of them used to pay about N5000 monthly in the past when the power company was publicly owned, there were pressurized that their bills rose to about N20,000 per month after it was privatized and this was mostly a fixed bill which was on a post paid basis.

Gradually, the power company, in a move to pacify their customers rolled out prepaid meters in order to help people pay for only what they consume rather than what was estimated. However, even with the new prepaid meters, there is still a fixed monthly charge electricity users in Nigeria still need to pay irrespective of whether electricity was used or not. So, now in Nigerian, the power bill is divided into 2 parts and they are fixed and variable parts.

Well, the good thing about the new power billing system in Nigeria is that people can choose to reduce their monthly bills by simply reducing how much electricity they consumed. They can do this by either switching off some electronics, using electricity efficient devices or simply using renewable energy sources such as solar energy.

If a person is paying for electricity based on a pay as you use basis or would I say a variable basis, he can do certain things to reduce his bills as it is within his control to do so. He would be able to generate more electricity privately and on his own without the need to depend on the power company. A solar panel connected to an inverter makes this possible.

As I mentioned earlier in one of my writings, an inverter power system can power a home with electricity even when there is a power cut and it can last for many hours depending n how much charge the batteries are carrying.

One smart way I know a person can reduce his electricity bill is by making use of solar energy system connected to an inverter system.

A solar energy system consists of a solar panel facing the sun and connected to a solar charge controller with a deep cycle battery. Single or multiple batteries can be used and they keep charging as long as the solar panels are generating electric charges. When sunlight hits solar panels, they have that capacity to create electricity because of their nature and they would transmit this through a conductor to the battery but that conductor would have to pass through a charge controller first so that the charging done on the battery is done in a controlled manner.

The more batteries you hook up to your solar panel, the more the value of the electric charges that would be stored and the more power it will be able to supply to the Inverter when it requests for it.

The job of the inverter would be basically to tap power from the solar charged batteries and then supply them to devices requesting for it at your home or office. It doesn't generate power on it's own but taps power from charges stored on the deep cycle battery but what it does differently is converting Direct Current (D.C.) into Alternating Current (A.C.) which is the form of power suitable for most electronic devices.

So, a power inverter can tap power generated from solar panels and hence saves the user money he would have spent on paying electricity bills since he has already paid for it by installing the Solar powered inverter system. The more solar generated electricity he uses, the less electricity bill he would have to pay since he rarely uses that.

Many people who use an Inverter at their homes or offices may at times think they are having free power because it works when there is a power cut like it's common in Nigeria but the truth is that an Inverter system connected to your main power actually increases your electricity usage and hence bill because it's just saving the electrical energy you'd still use and so it's not really free power, If you however have a solar powered system, you'd actually be getting it a bit freer since you only have to make a one time investment to reap long term benefits and good solar panels really last long.

So, If you already have an existing Power inverter system that taps power from the mains, your electricity bill would still remain the same or rather increase but if you decide to disconnect it from the main power and switch over to Solar generated power, then you would be reducing the amount of money you'd have to spend on paying for electricity.

What I'm basically saying is that you can't reduce your electricity bill if you still have an inverter hooked up to your mains since it keeps reading on your power meter but if you hook it up rather to a home installed Solar power system, then the bills you pay monthly to the power company will be reduced.

Considering the fact that electricity supply in Nigeria hardly meets demand and would probably be unable to do so in the short term, it's probably best for many Nigerians to invest more of their future power budget on Solar Powered inverter systems which is basically a system that generates electricity from the sun and stores it in deep cycle batteries for later use by an inverter.