We live in a remote location and get our water from rainwater captured in cisterns.

I would like to also run our water pump, which creates the water pressure in the house, on solar electric panels.

So we would use a large bank of batteries to collect solar power in the batteries, and then an inverter powered by the batteries to actually run the pump.

The water pump says that it is 1 1/2 horsepower, which is a lot. It is a very big house.

The pump only runs intermittently. It charges a pressure tank and only comes on when the pressure drops. So there is a period of time when the solar panels can recharge between uses of the pump. It might be several hours or (if the washing machine or clothes washer is running) every 5 to 10 minutes).

How can I figure out what size solar panels I need and how big of an inverter I need?

We would also need some kind of back-up power from the grid which does not automatically prefer the grid over the solar panels. Adding back-up power from the grid is easy. Giving the solar panels time to work before drawing from the grid is the hard part. We don’t want the grid to charge the batteries leaving the solar panels nothing to do.