Why Should You Use Solar Energy for the Home?

Though environmentalists have encourage use of solar energy for the home for years now, the financial aspect of adding solar energy to the home have stopped many people from using this energy source.

For the most part, homeowners have either avoided solar energy at home or have added components such as water heaters to use some solar energy features without the high cost of adding multiple photovoltaic panels.

Builders Now Featuring Solar Energy for the Home

For a long time one of the problems of building a home that used solar energy to provide for power consumption was the building industry. Builders didn't fully understand how solar energy could be captured or how to build a home that was best designed to capture power from the sun.

Part of installing solar energy for the home is the need to have a home where air can flow easily from one room to another. The power will have the best benefits in a home where high R factor insulation is used and where windows and doors do not promote heat loss by transference.

One benefit of adding solar energy for the home is that you don't have to completely cover your home in solar panels. You may add enough panels to heat water or to provide heat to a portion of the home.

Solar power does not require you to abandon your current HVAC system but can work with your heating and cooling system to reduce the costs of providing electricity in the home.

Do It Yourself Solar Energy for the Home

You don't have to be an expert to install your own solar panels. It can cost $25,000 for installation of a solar energy system but you can make that same home conversion to solar power for far less money.

You can go online today and find detailed instructions for how to build your own solar panels. This includes text and videos with step by step details that will allow you to start converting your present home to a home powered by the energy from the sun.

Solar enthusiasts have long promoted the idea of living off the grid. This means being totally self sufficient and is a return to the past in many ways.

Today most homes are wired into local power companies. This is convenient but can be expensive as costs of energy production continue to rise each year. It's not so convenient when a storm or blackout cuts the power to your home.

When you use solar energy to provide the electricity your home needs, you can become totally self reliant. Your power is never off as you are constantly producing your own power and storing it until needed.

Costs and Rebates

If you building your own panels to provide solar energy for the home, the cost will be a small percentage of that required to installing manufactured photovoltaic panels.

You can even find book that teach you how to build wind turbines to create power. These guides have become widely available and materials needed for the construction are not difficult to locate or expensive to purchase.

Solar energy is a simple concept. The sun sends free energy to the earth every day. That's the warmth you feel outdoors and many natural materials such as rocks absorb that energy easily. Solar energy is responsible for the some of heat problems experienced by large metropolitan areas.

Thousands of acres of concrete cover the earth's surface to provide parking space for million of automobiles. Concrete easily absorbs the heat energy from the sun and also reflects some of the sun's rays back into the air.

Flooding is one result of the overuse of concrete as the natural siphoning system of the earth cannot operate when covered in inches of concrete.

Parking lots and roads must have engineers designing run off for rainwater to avoid runoff causing neighborhood floods once the concrete has been poured.

There is perhaps no hotter place to be on a summer day than the parking lot of a large mall. The hot concrete will burn your hand if you touch it and the reflected sun's heat raises the air temperature by several degrees.

Summary

You probably don't wonder why you should use solar energy for your home but may have believed the cost solar power was beyond your budget.

If you are willing to learn and put in a bit of work you can build your own solar panels and can add solar energy for your home at a fraction of the cost of buying commercially build products.

In addition, you may find rebates offered by government agencies or by power companies for those homeowners willing to install solar energy. The proponents of solar energy for the home will tell you how clean energy improves the quality of our air and water and discuss the joys to be found when living off the grid.

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