Wait, panels are that cheap? Could you point me to a good place to buy them?
I don't know what, where, or how many you want, but these are by the pallet (~30ea) and about $6500. You can get much cheaper with used ones.
You get conservatively ~3hr of effective peak power per day (so a 400W panel will give you 1200Wh). You also need a DC converter for these to charge a battery or go to AC. Of course you'll want to mount them at the correct angle with a good view of the sun.
But used panels, at 80% rated output, are even cheaper, as low as $150. A few of those will fail, so you keep spares. They are often repairable in a few minutes if you are not afraid of a soldering iron, e.g. replace a diode or MOSFET.
Any roofer will put in mounting brackets, and almost any electrician is happy to put in the panel.
https://www.remodelingcosts.org/solar-panel-costs-increase-s...
That includes labor, mounting hardware, inverters and grid tie in. It also assumes high efficiency panels.
Watch out before buying older technology (lower efficiency) panels. Some have significant efficiency losses per degree Celsius increase in temperature.
Also, installation of the panels currently costs more than panels. They don't say (or I didn't find) how efficient the optimal fixed mount is, but the agent starts at 80%, so assume some fixed position is 80% of optimal. They increase that to 96%, so they reduce the number of solar panels by about 13%. If the installation labor cost increases more than ~26% because of the servo mount, then the servo mount hardware and frame would need to be cheaper than fixed mounts for it to break even. Similarly, the amount of aluminum being consumed by solar panel installions is non-trivial, and the movable frame is likely to increase that.
However, this is still a cool hobby project with a nice writeup.
That's partly the racquet people set up to snag government grant dollars, but still true.
