I'm the kind of person who buys things way before I need them. I hold onto it until I need it because I know it's not going to go bad and when I want it then it'll be there when I do.

I was thinking about buying a solar panel here and a solar panel there and just holding onto them until I get around to finishing my house and I can actually put them to use. But I'm starting to think that It'd be a lot better if I hold off on this purchase in the hopes that the prices will go down a little bit in the time it takes me to be ready for them.

Solar panels are still really expensive, market price is about $5 a watt right now and this, to me, is a crazy price to have to pay to generate your own electricity from the sun.

Let's look at that price a little closer and compare it to the cost of getting electricity from the power company.

Average price for electricity on the North American continent (Canada, USA and Mexico) is around 10 cents per kilowatt hour. That means that you can run your 1000 watt AC unit for one whole hour and the electricity that you used to do it will cost you just 10 cents. It's a pretty reasonable price to pay for electricity if you're living in the USA or Canada. The average Mexican laborer is going to have to work for about an hour to pay for that same kilowatt hour of electricity.

Considering that we're paying $5 a watt for solar panels right now we need to find out just how much electricity we can buy from the power company for $5 and it works out to an easy 50 kilowatt hours of electricity.

So our 1 watt of solar panel has to generate 50 kilowatt hours of electricity just to break even!

Let's see how long it'll take to generate 50 kilowatt hours with our 1 watt of solar panel.

Solar panels are measured in watts so to be on the same scale we change the 50 kilowatt hours to 50,000 watt hours.

Of course there's going to be some rounding off of numbers here depending where you are and how efficient a solar panel will be in your area, but let's say that we will get 6.5 hours of efficient electricity generating sunlight per day. I'm going to take the 50,000 watt hours and divide that by 6.5 hours of sun per day to get 7,692 days to generate 50,000 watt hours or $5 worth of electricity.

Oh! The final calculation 7,692 days divided by the 365 days in a year and we come up with just 21 years to generate $5 worth of electricity.

This is why it's really important to look for good deals on solar panels. Sometimes you can find solar panels for $4 - $4.50 a watt on web sites like Amazon.com so it's worth checking them out if you're in the market for solar panels.