Introduction to Solar Power and Home Energy Efficiency
Solar Panel Cost
Up until now, solar power has been more expensive than using polluting fossil fuels to generate energy. But thanks to government research investment into the industry, as well as the ever-increasing adoption of the technology by regular consumers, the cost for solar has dropped dramatically.
When you go solar, you have to invest in the hardware upfront. The rewards come over time, in the form of lower (or nonexistant) utility bills, and the increased value of your home.
Solar panel costs can vary widely, depending on what you choose. You can opt to go top of the line and professionally installed, or you can go extremely frugal by building your own panels quickly and cheaply and installing the system yourself.
For a complete and affordable DIY home course that will help you build a top-notch system and save big, we recommend DIYPowerSystem. Check it out.
Why A Solar Power Home?
Seriously, why have a Solar Power home? We’ve covered the first big reasons:
- lower utility bills
- increased home value
You can generate electricity for general use, use the sun’s heat directly to heat water or even to cook, use solar power passively to heat your home, and combine techniques to provide every single energy need your home might require.
But there are other really good reasons to go solar besides saving money and making your house more valuable. Here’s something you may not think about every day, but it’s becoming more and more critical to the entire human race: pollution. An individual carbon footprint adds up quickly when you have over 6 billion of them.
Check out these stats:
An average home, per year, uses 400 gallons of home heating oil, 50 gallons of liquid propane for barbacuing, and 1 ton of firewood. Let’s do some quick carbon footprint math:
- 400 gal heating oil/yr x 22.4 lbs CO2/gal = 8960 lbs of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) per year
- 50 gal liquid propane/yr x 12.7 lbs CO2/gal = 635 lbs of CO2 per year
- 1 ton firewood/yr x 3814 lbs CO2/ton = 3814 lbs C02 per year
Suppose you used heating oil, firewood and propane at your home, you could be pumping an eye-popping 13,409 pounds of deadly carbon dioxide into our atmosphere! Multiply that by billions of homes, and you start getting an idea of how bad things are getting.
Now here’s an easy to digest factoid: solar power has zero pollutants.
That’s right - if you switch your home to clean solar power, you can reduce your home’s carbon footprint from thousands of pounds of posions being spewed into our air to ZERO, nothing, nada, zip. Pretty cool, huh?
A Solar Family Affair
Solarizing your home is something that can help nurture strong bonds within the family. By tackling projects together and discussing all the great benefits of moving from dependency on fossil fuels (most of them shipped in from foreign countries, creating a whole different set of economic, national security and environmental issues), families can feel proud about their contribution to their own self-sufficiency, their neighborhood and town power consumption networks, and their global impact.
Getting together on a weekend to handcraft a solar panel or hot water generator, pulling together to assemble and install components, and just working together as a team is a terrific source of pride and cohesion for friends, families and extended family groups.
Hands-on work and discussion provides parents with an amazing opportunity to painlessly educate their kids and provide guidance on a wide variety of subjects, from responsibility and self-esteem, to science and craftsmanship to global socio-economics! Your kids will beam with pride the first time they flick a switch and understand that it was their work the made it possible for that lightbulb to shine.
So, to recap, solar power is good because you can lower your bills, increase your home’s value, and hey, save the planet and let you bond with the kids all at the same time. What’s not to like?
Are You Ready For Solar?
Before you can plunge headlong into converting your home to solar and getting off the grid, you need to make a sober assesment of your resources, liabilities, and goals.
Start by analyzing your monthly energy costs and comparing your energy use to a typical household’s. To figure out how much you’re spending, take your utility bill and divide the dollar total by the number of kilowatts used. To compare your rate, go to www.eia.doe.gov and look up the average usage rates for your state.
Examine your energy consumption - can you change the way you use appliances, heating and so on, adjusting your operating schedules to save energy? Perform an energy audit on your home, and assess if maintenance or simple system upgrades will increase energy efficiency.
From installing awnings to turning down your thermostat to using more energy-efficiency appliances, the more you can do ahead of time to pare down your usage and increase the efficiency of the power you do consume, the better. More efficiant power consumption means you will need smaller solar energy systems, and the lower your initial investment costs for the components.
It also means getting the biggest bang for your budget buck, as you will be able to invest in higher quality components for greater overall energy output and longer system life.
Solar Power Bottom Line
Moving to Solar Power is not a hardship, and can be done cheaply and easily. It provides many excellent benefits besides the obvious one of low- or no-cost power generation. All you need to get rolling is the how-to knowledge.
