Maximize Lead Generation with a Custom Solar Calculator
With a solar calculator, you can educate potential customers, qualify leads, and gather essential contact information.
By letting users explore their options, estimate savings, and understand solar system costs, your calculator helps convert interest into action.
With this tool, users can easily evaluate key factors like:
- Panel sizing and pricing options
- Power consumption and system capacity
- Installation costs and energy savings
- Return on investment and payback period
- Financing and design considerations
Our no-code calculator builder allows you to fully customize this solar calculator using familiar equations and layouts from Excel or Google Sheets.
Input your products and pricing. Connect to your CRM and email systems for follow up. And have a lead generation machine that runs 24/7 on autopilot.
Edit our templates or build from scratch to fit your business needs and automate your lead generation.
Benefits of a Solar Power Calculator
Let’s take a quick look at the benefits a solar power calculator can bring.
A website calculator improves user engagement
Adding a calculator widget to your website instantly makes it more dynamic and interactive.
A solar power calculator is very effective at catching people’s attention and compels them to spend more time on your site to play around with the numbers on their own. When people use online calculators, there’s always an element of anticipation and excitement involved which translates to better brand recognition and name recall.
You can add different options and settings to your calculator so that it can handle a wide range of solar power requirements and specifications. This not only makes your solar calculator more engaging to use, but also makes its results more precise and accurate.
A calculator form gets you more inquiries and leads
Convincing people to click on your call-to-action button is much easier if it’s placed next to an interactive calculator.
When visitors see that you’re providing a useful resource and you’re making it easy to access hard-to-find information, they’ll form positive associations with your brand and will start to trust you more. After getting results from your calculator, they’ll be more willing to enter their contact information to either book an appointment, request for a quote, or sign up to your marketing emails.
Lead follow-ups and nurturing will be easier because the calculator has already done some of the preliminary work with respect to setting the right expectations. It’s already answered a lot of their basic questions as far as sizing, savings and pricing are concerned. This leads to a significant uptick in successful conversions in a relatively short amount of time.
Your website gets better SEO results and more traffic
People who end up on your solar calculator are less likely to just hit the back button or close the browser to move on to the next page on their list.
At the very least, it will buy you a couple more seconds as they try to figure out what your calculator is all about. This will have a dramatic effect on your bounce rate which search engines like Google use to determine the quality and relevance of your website and domain.
Over time, you’ll see more site traffic and your page rankings will start moving up on the search engine results as your calculator and website becomes recognized as a very useful online resource.
You can also quickly rise to the top of the local and mobile SEO results for specific keywords if you’re one of the few solar companies with a useful calculator.
A solar calculator strengthens your value proposition
Potential clients and customers who are interested in putting up a solar power system have many things on their mind and will often gloss over different sections of your website without fully grasping your messaging.
A calculator lets you easily break down complex concepts that would normally require hundreds of words, many infographics, and lots of hours to fully understand.
Setting up a custom solar lead generation form with a website form is easy.
With just a couple of clicks and keystrokes, calculators can quickly help people better visualize different scenarios on their own. This gives your value proposition a lot more context and helps your audience better understand the tangible and intangible benefits that your products and services can deliver.
Once your visitors and target audience have heard you out, the journey from visitor to lead becomes much shorter, which directly translates into more sales and growth.
A website calculator saves you time and money on marketing and customer service
Even a very basic solar energy calculator can positively affect different aspects of your business.
Set up a solar sales funnel on your website and let it do the work for you.
When you let people freely use the formulas and calculations you normally use to provide estimates and answer questions, you and your team will spend less time explaining the same things over and over again to every new lead that you get. Instead of constantly replying to emails and fielding phone calls left and right, you can free up resources for more important business needs.
Potential customers also won’t have to wait days for an email or phone call just to get a simple question answered if they can find out on their own using your solar calculator widget. A quick response leads to less frustration and will often keep them adequately satisfied until you have time to properly address their concern. This helps create a positive image for your business and makes your targets more receptive to your marketing campaigns.
A calculator form generates specific market data
Our calculators don’t just crunch numbers for your visitors, they also do double duty as extremely effective lead magnets and lead generation forms.
If they click on your calculator’s call-to-action, we can not only collect their contact information but also the info and variables used with the calculator. This gives you more insight into the type of customer you’re attracting and what most people are looking for. It’s the type of invaluable market data that can help you steer your marketing and business operations in the right direction to meet people’s needs.
We’ve also made it easy to collect and aggregate customer data by including easy ways to connect with popular CRM platforms and databases with our calculator builder’s many integrations, so you can further analyze the data using your preferred methods.
How to Calculate Solar Power Payback Period
Solar calculators are most often used to help customers understand how a solar power system can lower their electric bills. The calculated savings can then be used to estimate how many years it will take to see a return on investment, or what is known in the solar energy industry as the payback period. ROI is one of the most important considerations people have when deciding on whether or not solar energy is right for them.
A very simple way to calculate the payback period for solar power is to take the total cost of the system and divide it by the estimated annual savings on electricity costs.
Total System Cost ÷ Average Annual Energy Cost Savings = Payback Period (Years)
To calculate annual savings just subtract the new average electric bill with the average of the old bill and multiply it by 12 months.
(Old Electric Bill - New Electric Bill) x 12 months = Annual Energy Cost Savings
Example:
Let’s say a solar power setup costs $10,000 in total after accounting for federal and local incentives. This new solar array is able to cut down the electric bill in half from $200 to $100 a month, which adds up to $1,200 in savings per year.
($200 - $100) x 12 months = $1,200 in savings per year
To get the estimated payback period just divide the $10,000 with the estimated energy savings of $1,200 a year.
$10,000 ÷ $1,200 = 8.33 years
This sample solar power system will have paid for itself In roughly 8 years and 4 months, and will continue to save you money for many years to come.
How to Calculate Solar Power System Size
Every solar power system should be properly sized to suit a customer’s specific requirements. Solar power calculators are invaluable tools when it comes to determining how big the solar panel array should be so that it can reliably power essential electrical appliances, especially if the system is off-grid.
There are lots of factors to consider when choosing a solar power system. The more prominent ones include:
- Energy and kWh requirements
- Solar array size
- Number of solar panels required
- Solar panel efficiency
- Battery capacity
- Sun exposure (solar hours per day)
- Roof area (square footage) and angle
It’s hard to take all these specifications and data into consideration all in one go, especially for someone who’s new to solar energy. But a well-designed calculator can make short work of the task and give out estimates and recommendations quickly.
To calculate your energy requirements, check how many watts an electrical appliance consumes. Multiply the wattage by the number of hours it’s used per day and you get a number of watt hours it needs per day.
Watt Consumption x Hours per Day = Watt Hours per Day
Add up the watt hour usage for your most important appliances and devices to figure out how many watt hours you’ll need from your solar power system per day.
Example:
Let’s get the total energy usage for these appliances.
