Solar Payback Calculator
Tell us what you run at home. We’ll work out what you need, what it should cost, and whether it is actually worth it
Every unit of light your generator makes costs you somewhere around ₦1,000 once you count the fuel, the servicing and buying the next generator. The same unit from NEPA on Band A costs ₦209.50. Almost nobody has ever seen those two numbers side by side. This page puts them there, then works out honestly what solar would cost you as a third option.
1. What do you run in your house?
4.8 units a dayLED bulb
10W
Security / outdoor light
30W
Nobody switches everything on at once. All of it together would be 1.5 kW, so we have sized for about 1.1 kW at a time. This is what decides how big an inverter you need. Pick a bigger share if yours is the kind of house where the AC, the pump and the iron all come on together.
2. Where you live, and your light
Around 4.5 hours of strong sun a day here. We assume dust, heat and the wiring itself swallow about 22% of what your panels make — Nigerian dust is far worse than the figures most solar software uses.
Band C (12–16 hrs/day) — ₦46 per unit. The hours your band is meant to give you are also what decides how much your generator has to cover.
3. The generator you run now
4. How much do you want backed up?
Either way you get enough panels to cover a full day’s use. What changes here is how much the battery has to carry you through the night — and that is the single biggest thing that decides whether a quote is two million or seven.
What the numbers suggest
You could be about even in 6 years 8 months
On these numbers, from around month 80 you would be spending less each month than you do today on light plus fuel. Panels also tend to keep working well past the 10 years this estimate covers.
This is an estimate worked out from what you typed in and from prices that move. It is not advice, a quote, or a promise about what you would actually save.
Keep this, or send it to someone
The link remembers everything you typed, so whoever opens it sees your numbers, not ours. Handy for arguing with an installer, or for showing your spouse why the generator has to go.
What you would need
Inverter
2.5 kVA
runs it all at once
Panels
1.4 kWp
about 3 panels
Battery
5 kWh
4.0 kWh you can actually use
Prices checked in August 2026. Treat this as a ballpark, not a quote. Two shops can charge five times as much as each other for what they both call the same system, almost always because one is quietly giving you a much smaller battery. Nobody in Nigeria publishes independent solar prices — everyone we got these from sells solar, so shop around.
What a unit of light really costs you
Roughly what one unit of power costs you from each source, with everything counted — fuel, servicing, and replacing the thing when it dies.
Your generator is doing about 1.0 hours a day to cover what the grid does not, and burning roughly 0.79 litres for every unit it makes. Be aware that nobody has actually metered these small generators — every published figure is an estimate from a seller or a spec sheet, and they disagree a lot. If you know what yours really drinks, put your own number in under Advanced.
Lithium or tubular battery? Where most people lose money
Both of these give you the same amount of backup. They are not the same size, because a tubular battery only lets you take out half of what is inside it.
| Lithium | Tubular | |
|---|---|---|
| Price on the tag, per kWh | ₦220,000 | ₦110,000 |
| What you really pay, per kWh you can use | ₦275,000 | ₦220,000 |
| Size you would need | 5 kWh | 8 kWh |
| How long it lasts | 8–12 years | 3–5 years |
| Times you replace it in 10 years | 0 | 2 |
| What the whole system costs today | ₦2,163,000 | ₦1,921,000 |
| All the batteries you buy in 10 years | ₦1,100,000 | ₦2,640,000 |
| Everything, over 10 years | ₦7,275,250 | ₦8,793,250 |
Tubular is cheaper to buy, and looks like about ₦1,518,000 more to live with
Going tubular saves you ₦242,000 the day you buy. Then you have to replace it 2 more times within 10 years. And to give you the same backup it has to be bigger in the first place — 8 kWh against 5 kWh — because you can only ever take out half of what is inside it. That is the catch, and hardly anybody selling you a system will point it out.
Ten years of spending, both ways
Everything you will have spent, adding up as the years go by. The red line is carrying on as you are. The green line starts high — that is the day you pay for the system — and then barely moves.
Carry on as you are
₦8,358,975
Put in solar
₦7,275,250
Look how much the generator still costs you. We assume you keep the generator and still run it 0.5 hours a day for bad days, because most Nigerian households do not actually sell it. At ₦1,250 a litre that habit alone costs ₦3,764,063 over 10 years — often more than the solar system itself. If you would genuinely switch it off, set that to zero under and watch what happens to the payback.
Could be around ₦1,083,725 better off over 10 years
About even at today’s fuel price: around month 80. If fuel falls to ₦875/litre: around month 117. If it rises to ₦1,625/litre: around month 61. Fuel is the one number here most likely to make a nonsense of the rest.
Nobody is paying us for this. No solar company, shop or bank has paid to appear on this page, and we earn nothing if you buy. If that ever changes we will say so right here, in plain words — and the money will still never be allowed to change the answer.
This calculator will tell you not to buy solar when the sums say so. One that always says buy would be no use to you.
These are estimates, not quotes. The prices come from Nigerian solar shops and two real itemised installation quotes, checked in August 2026 — there is no official price list for solar in Nigeria, so nothing here is gospel. The sunlight figures come from Nigerian research, and we allow for far more dust than international solar software does, because harmattan is real. The light tariffs are the same ones in our electricity bill calculator. Before you spend this kind of money, get at least three written quotes.
How Much Does Solar Cost in Nigeria?
There is no single answer, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. Published all-in prices for a 5 kVA solar system in Nigeria span roughly ₦1.6 million to ₦8 million — a fivefold spread. The credible middle is about ₦2.5 million to ₦5.5 million, and the reason for the spread is not dishonesty. It is that “5 kVA” describes the inverter and says nothing at all about the battery.
A budget 5 kVA package might carry 2.4 kWh of usable storage. A premium one carries 8.5 kWh. Same headline number, completely different machine, and the battery is usually more than half the bill. This is why the calculator above prices by component — panels in kWp, battery in kWh, inverter in kVA — instead of quoting a system size. When you collect quotes, the single most useful question you can ask is how many kilowatt-hours of battery are in the price.
Is Solar Actually Cheaper Than a Generator?
Per unit of light, yes — and not by a little. The sum is simple: take the litres your generator burns in an hour, multiply by the pump price, and divide by the power it actually gives you. Then add servicing and the cost of the next generator. At ₦1,250 a litre, a normal household petrol generator works out somewhere around ₦1,000 per unit. Solar, spread over ten years, works out at about ₦200.
But cheaper per unit does not automatically mean worth buying, because solar wants all ten years of money from you on day one. Whether you get it back depends on how much your generator actually runs, and that comes down to your band. If you are on Band A with decent supply and your generator only runs forty minutes a day, you may never get your money back. If you are on Band D or E running four or five hours a day, you usually get it back in three to five years. The calculator tells you which one you are — including when the answer is don’t buy yet.
Lithium or Tubular Batteries?
This is where most Nigerian quotes quietly cost people money. A tubular battery sells for about ₦110,000 per kWh against lithium’s ₦220,000, so it looks half the price. It is not, for two reasons. First, you can only safely take out about half of what a tubular battery holds, against 80% for lithium — so you have to buy a much bigger one. Once you allow for that, the gap shrinks to roughly ₦220,000 against ₦275,000. Second, a tubular battery only lasts three to five years, so in ten years you buy it three times.
Put those together and the cheap battery is usually the expensive one. The calculator computes both chemistries side by side, always, rather than hiding it behind a toggle.
Why Our Numbers Are Lower Than the Brochure
The software most installers use is built on international settings that assume dust costs you about 2%. Nigerian measurements tell a very different story: research published in Renewable Energy recorded up to 68.6% yield loss over seventeen uncleaned months in the north, and a follow-up soiling map found the standard global dataset underestimates Nigerian soiling. Panel degradation measured at Maiduguri runs 1.2–1.5% a year against a global norm of 0.5–0.8%.
So we assume your panels deliver 74–78% of what they say on the box, rather than the 86% the international software assumes, and we put washing the panels on the billinstead of pretending it is free. Expect our estimate of what you will generate to be lower than an installer’s. That is on purpose.
Import Duty, VAT and the “Solar Ban”
Solar equipment enters Nigeria at 0% import duty and 0% VAT, and there is no import ban. Nigeria Customs circular T&T/2024/18 put panels at zero duty under the ECOWAS common external tariff, and the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 — in force since 1 January 2026, the same statute behind our PAYE calculator— preserves it for panels, inverters, batteries and charge controllers under section 144. The widely reported 2025 “solar import ban” was never enacted and was fact-checked false; the Rural Electrification Agency has since said it is on hold pending local manufacturing capacity. A phased tariff from 2027 is under discussion, which could raise panel prices — so there is no duty line in this calculator today, and a note here if that changes.
Related reading: Generator vs Band A electricity: what a kWh actually costs and what Nigeria’s electricity tariff bands actually mean. To estimate the grid half of your bill on its own, use the electricity bill calculator.