HOME SOLAR POWER

Henry Dover answers:

I doubt that you are going to want to learn how to dope your own silicon wafers, add contacts and laminate them into PV panels.  I also doubt that you’re going to even want the various chemicals to make e.g. Cadmium-based cells anywhere near your house (cadmium is a very toxic metal).  In other words, making your own solar panels is not an at-home project.

You can buy solar panels based on cells of several different types.  A link to a Pricewatch-like website for current prices on solar panels is below.  Mounting panels to roofs or pole mounts, running conduit and wires, and installing battery banks and inverters are within the capabilities of skilled laypeople.

More data at the links.

Edit:  I am reporting all of Agua-Luna’s cut-and-paste pieces as spam.  I encourage others to do likewise.

Henry Dover answers:

Easier to buy the solar panels than to build them.
Unless you have a silicone crystal cutting machine?

Solar panel, inverter, batteries, charge controller, and lots of patience are all part of
building a system for the home

Henry Dover answers:

If you haven’t built your home yet yes, theoretically you can do geothermal, but takes a LOT of space & you need a geoteck study to see if its viable where your home is. Never seen it in residential. Go solar.

Henry Dover answers:

First, you want to use passive solar energy. For this simply use concrete floors install large south faceing windows (if your in the northern hemesphere) and plant diciduouse trees (trees that loose thier leaves in winter) on the south side of your property and coniferouse trees on the north side. In summer the trees will grow on the south and north sides of your house providing shade and cooling your house. In winter the trees on the south will loose thier leaves allowing sunlight to enter the large south windows. The concrete floor will stor the heat warming your house, while the coniferouse trees block wind also warming your house. Just the trees allown can save you from 10-50% on energy bills for heating and cooling. Also you can use solar panels with batteries attatched. This will provide most of the electricity for your house. And if you produce extra energy it can be sold back to the power companies. Also small wind turbines can be installed to provide aditional power.

Henry Dover answers:

First and foremost, I would try to work things out directly with my neighbor before going to an outside authority. Being on good terms with the neighbors is beyond price.

Whether this is legal depends on your location. In most places, a permanent structure requires a permit. If these are solar electric panels, then they have a long life, and the structure would likely be considered permanent.

If the structure is sending a lot of glare or heat into your bedroom, you may have cause for complaint, no matter where you live.

If it’s simply an eyesore, then this really depends on where you live. In California, by state law the reasonable application of solar may not be restricted. Especially if the mobile home has a flat roof or one that isn’t oriented towards the sun, that structure could be considered reasonable, I think. In other places, laws vary.

Henry Dover answers:

First you have to figure out how much electricity is needed to run your house. Check your electric bills for the last year, figure out an average KWH/ day and the maximum KWH/day used in the year.

Your normal solar system can only generate usable electricity for less than 8 hours a day in the summer and 5 hours a day in the winter. Varies some as you move farther north and how many cloudy days you have. Example Tucson AZ is considered an ideal climate for solar power and has 7.42 sun hours per day maximum and 6.01 sun hours per day minimum (winter) with an average of 6.57 sun hours per day This means an average of 6.5 hours per day of usable solar electricity. Do a search on ” Insolation chart ” to find your area.

Anyway a half decent price for a 1.9 KW system which produces approximately 12KWH per day is around $13,000 un-installed. Add the cost of the installation and the fact that 12 KWH per day is not enough to reduce your bill to zero and a typical whole house system will cost around $80,000 without installation and without battery backups for nighttime electricity.

General information: http://www.homepower.com/basics/solar/
Good luck
Google search on quotes for solar: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=household+%22solar+electric%22+system+quotes&btnG=Search

Henry Dover answers:

I couldn’t find that many reviews but what i did find shows that it is a good way to go here`s the links i found

http://www.12voltsolarpanels.net/charge-your-cell-phone

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11288_7-6427792-3.html

http://www.nextag.com/solar-cell-phone-charger/stores-html

Henry Dover answers:

Energy_led = Energy_pvmodule

Energy_led = t_night*I*V

Energy_pvmodule = Pdc_stc * t_peaksun_eqiv

Solve for Pdc_stc (power direct current at standard test conditions):
Pdc_stc = t_night*I*V/t_peaksun_eqiv

Data:
t_night = 12 hours
t_peaksun_eqiv = 5 hrs
I = 0.025 Amps
V = 1.2 Volts

Result:
Pdc_stc = 0.072 Wdc

This is the minimum nameplate size at standard test conditions that your PV module can be.

In reality, it will need to be much more…because you will need to compensate for battery charging and discharging loss…as well as the inefficiency of the MPPT charge controller.

To figure the area associated with it, you need to know the efficiency of the PV module…call it eta.

Typically, this ranges from 10% for laminates to 22% for some of the best crystalline designs.

Let’s accept eta = 15%.

We equate DC peak power to incident solar radiation (J) multiplied by efficiency (eta) multiplied by module area (A):
Pdc_stc = J*A*eta

Solve for A:
A = Pdc_stc/(J*eta)

J = 1000 W/m^2
eta = 0.15
Pdc_stc = 0.072 Wdc

Result:
A = 0.00048 m^2
aka
A = 4.8 cm^2

Henry Dover answers:

I didn’t notice an annual cost mentioned in your question. If the cost of the leased system is equal to the portion of your electricity bill that would be displaced, I’d say the lease is a good deal. Electricity has increased at about a 6% rate over the years, I believe.

You’ll have to check the contract to see what would happen if you move. Possibly, the balance will be due in full, or they’ll reposess the panels. Will they put a lien against your house on account of this, or are the panels themselves the only security?

Possible red flags:

- They pressure you to sign on the spot.
- They don’t have the full contract handy.
- They are selling a future installation, and have no examples of their installs in your neighborhood.
- They want the deposit long in advance of the actual work being done. (There are many scams where you give a deposit, and you never see them again.)
- They do not have a physical office, where you can drop by and see stacks of panels, inverters, wire, conduit, tools, and other things necessary for an installation by a real company.
- There is no performance guarantee, but the price is fixed. If the deal is you would pay $x per kWh produced, great. But without a performance guarantee, they could put up a cheap, crappy system that hardly saves you any electricity, and you would owe on the lease for the next 15 years, on top of your regular electricity bill.
- There is no provision in the contract for what happens if the system breaks. What if they put up something substandard that breaks after a year, and produces no electricity thereafter? Is it your responsibility to get it fixed? Are you forgiven your lease payment until it is fixed?

Note that the lease-to-own scheme is not the usual way that people choose to get panels installed. With the exception of large corporations that put up on the order of a megawatt of panels, I know of no one who leases.

If this is a company that also does conventional installs (the homeowner owns it outright), and you are able to find references of their work in your area that you can visit, I’d be more inclined to trust them.

Henry Dover answers:

There are a lot of ways to define largest:

- sales
-market cap
- number of units placed
- number of employees

You should be more specific. Also, remember that some companies that make solar are part of a bigger company, so it is hard to differentiate the solar part from the rest of the company.

Henry Dover answers:

Why are laptops costly, when plastic and wires are available everywhere?
Why are diamonds costly when coal is available everywhere?

Henry Dover answers:

Ever seen the EPA guidelines for handling the new and improved so called Green Light Bulbs ? Its about 5 pages long and contains such passages as if a bulb should accidentally break , immediately air out the premises by opening adjacent doors and outside windows . After 15 minutes the area should be considered safe enough to return for disposal . ————-Sounds like a radiation leak exercise to me.

Henry Dover answers:

Electric cars are getting better when it comes to mileage per hour of recharging. But they still require energy, namely electric energy. Which begs the question “what do you think is the best idea for alternative production of electricity?” Maybe solar generation will be made more efficient over the next decade if both business and government invest enough in the technology.

Hybrids are a good stepping stone. It’s still some gasoline, but at least you get superb mileage and consume less petro.

Hydrogen is a rather stupid idea since it is not only dangerously explosive, but takes more energy to initially produce than it releases when burned. I’m not saying there is no role for hydrogen fuel, just that it can never be a major energy staple.

I think biofuel, especially cellulose ethanol, is the most practical long-term solution to our fuel energy issues. Critics will insist that ethanol doesn’t work, that its production consumes more oil energy than the bio energy we get out of it. But that is only because we use mediocre biofuel crops (such as corn) and we produce it by more primitive means.

Brazil, which uses the “old production” method still gets a strong net energy gain on its sugarcane ethanol, mainly because sugarcane is a better crop for producing “old” ethanol than corn. But the “new” way of producing alcohol from fiber rather than sugar could increase gallons-per-acre yield more than twofold from Brazil’s sugarcane and make ethanol a truly feasible fuel. In temperate climates with distinct winter seasons, switchgrass and hempstalk would be excellent “new” ethanol crops since sugarcane isn’t hardy and the new method produces far more fuel anyway.

Even with alternative fuel we still have to cut down on the total miles that society drives by encouraging more carpooling, mass transit, and opportunities to work/shop closer to home.

Henry Dover answers:

Solar power cannot be harnessed during a storm, on a cloudy day or at night. This limits how much power can be saved for future days. Some days you may still need to rely on oil to power your home.

Henry Dover answers:

Star for you! I 100% agree with you! I was feeling pretty cynical yesterday, when I answered a question about someone wanting to be “green.”

Here’s the link to THAT question:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AknsqPBgXq3M1zHLEFsZx_Pty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20071210194356AAUknPU&show=7#profile-info-AA12157050

For my husband and I, who really DO live very “green” lives, I get pretty tired of the folks who do one little thing, and then think they have saved the earth.

CFL bulbs happen to be one of my big pet peeves right now. I too was suckered into them. When I found they were not holding up to their promises, I did some research, and found they are made in China, use more electricity to produce than they will ever save, of course are shipped over the ocean, are toxic waste, since they have mercury in them, last only about 7 months in my house (vs 3 years for the incandecents!), and certainly not the seven perdicted years, and to top it off, are packaged in plastic clam shells instead of the highly recyclable cardboard of incandecents.

And yet people are trying to pass LAWS that state I MUST use them (here in the U.S.)? Oh please!

No vehicle my husband and I drive is newer than 20 years…not a single one. Some are over 40 years old. The tractors we use are even older than that (1930′s for some).

Our vehicles all did their manufacturing environmental damage more than a generation ago. Every one of them can run on the biofuel we produce right here on our farm. If my husband and I needed or wanted to, we could become nearly totally indepentant of foreign oil. Of course funny enough their are laws that prevent us from driving our biofuel on the roads, so we don’t. Be green! Oh no, wait…it’s illegal to be green!

Shall we talk about the fact that I produce very humanely raised and cared for meat goats, and meat rabbits? It is however totally illegal for me to butcher an animal for our customers, right here in very clean, very sanitary open air, and sunshine outdoors. I can however take my animals to be butchered at a slaughterhouse that processes 400 or more animals an hour and allow my customers to pick the meat up there. Of course I know which is cleaner, and much more humane, but that does not matter…it is still illegal for me to butcher for my customers in environmentally green ways. Thank heavens in my state it is still legal for customers to come to my farm and butcher the animals themselves….I’m sure that loophole will be closed eventually.

I agree with you, that a free market is great. Funny thing is, the greener your lifestyle, the more likely you are to run into laws that make it illegal.

Let’s face it….the Government only wants people to become so independant. If people were suddenly driven to become very independant, living green lives, in a mostly agrarian way, it would drastictly lower the taxes the Government brought in, and there-by lower the amount of power the Government has (just think of it!). No, wait…don’t think…it makes the Government nervous when people turn off the TV and think for themselves.

What really drive me nuts are the hypocrits. People who tell me I’m cruel and heartless for killing and butchering a cute widdle bunny wabbit, or widdle goat I’ve raised….while freely admiting they eat meat! So they will consume the flesh of some animal they have no idea what was fed to it, what drugs were pumped into it, nor how it was treated…yet I’m the cruel one?! Oh please!

I hate the hypocrits who preach living a green life, and yet do not do it themselves, indeed spend time jetting about the world (think Gore). I am really botherd by the new trend of people and companies toward buying “carbon credits.” What a HUGE load of horse pucky! Bloody well clean up your own act, don’t pretend it’s all better, because you purchased carbon credits from someone else who REALLY does live a green lifestyle!

Ok….I think I’m going to stop right there, before I say something I shouldn’t.

Great question!

~Garnet
Homesteading/Farming over 20 years