The home was designed by starchitect to Hollywood, Richard Landry, with the
What probably piqued my curiousity the most was their efforts and claims of powering the house by solar pv which begged the question at 14,000 sq ft what kind of solar array do they have and how much power is it producing? I searched high and low for some actual stats on the installation and the panels but couldn’t find anything, so my fall back became trying to come up with a rough estimate based upon the number of solar panels visible on the roof and what appears to be a ground array just above the home – the count that I came up with was 150 panels in all. Not knowing the actual power rating of the system, I give the couple credit that they probably used a top of the line panel rated at 250 watts – rating the whole system at 37.5 kilowatts.
210 kWh a day, 76,650 kWh a year 6,387 kWh a month
To put that into perspective, according to the EIA in 2011 the average US household annual consumption was 11,280 kWh or just under 1,000 kWh a month. The average square feet for a single family home in the US for 2010 was about 2,300 sq ft.
If we’re comparing the US average to the Brady – Bundchen home, their solar PV system could power roughly 6 average American homes. Tom & Gisele’s home is about 7x to 10x the average American square footage – maybe on a pure numbers basis they are 100% powered by renewable energy, but they’re pretty darn close, especially if we assume they are using the latest in energy efficient heating and cooling, LED lights and other energy saving power options.
We’re not busting on Tom and Gisele, our purpose here was to hopefully illustrate the basic calculations used / needed to figure out how to power ones home by solar PV. Neat little exercise.
