Clean Diesel

Until approximately a hundred years ago in the West, people only had recourse to renewable energy for heat and light for their homes. They burnt wood and sometimes coal or peat (OK, fossil fuels) and got up when the sun came up and went to bed with the sun too. In, fact a large proportion of the world’s inhabitants still lives like that.

Things changed with mechanized industry and night shifts. Electricity producers sold the populace on being able to do more instead of just sleeping when it got dark, and the Western population got hooked on buying huge amounts of energy, mostly electricity and engine fuel, which was usually produced from oil and coal.

This idea soon travelled around the world and with rising prosperity came emulation and other countries wanted the same. Now we are in the sad situation where we have to confess that we rode the fossil fuel gravy train to its last stop without thinking about what we would use when fossil fuels ran out.

This is where the typical civilian comes in. You have to think about how you want to draw energy in the future. Do you want to be powered by keeping sucking unrenewable resources out of the Earth, or do you want to have as little to do with it as you can? Would you prefer to have everything you have now, but know that the resources that are powering your lifestyle are renewable?

If, like millions of others around the world, you would rather say ‘No!’ to traditional power production methods, then you have to take a stand. But not only in words, you really have to do some something about it physically.

This will mean paying a lot of money up front, which may not be a problem for you or you may even think that taking a stand is worth looking for a bank loan. These are commendable feelings, but I would like to suggest that there is another way to self-sufficiency.

You could build your own!

Why not? The technology has been around for years and is fairly straightforward. Most moderately capable teenagers can assemble a bank of photovoltaic cells into a solar panel and then plug that into your home’s electrical system. And if a teenager can manage it, so can you. All you (and the teenager) will require is a solar panel kit and a schematical diagram. A plan in other words.

A solar panel kit can be bought in your neighbourhood from a Do-It-Yourself store or from the Internet. A typical solar panel will take a few hours to fit together and will produce 100 watts of electrical energy. The electricity produced from these panels is then passed through an inverter that changes the current from DC to AC, making it usable by household appliances and the utility grid.

Do yourself and the planet a favour, get off the grid and start saving money and the planet’s resources, you will be surprised how straightforward it is once you get going. And do not forget, you can do it in stages of, say, one 100 watt panel a month until you hit self-sufficiency. It is not a question of ‘All or Nothing’.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with a favourite subject, types of renewable energy. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

categories: energy,global warming,climate change,alternative,sustainable,solar power,wind power,home and family,health,technology,science,other,uncategorised,fuel

When it comes to converting your home into a solar home, there are several alternatives, because not all homes have the same problems, the same requirements or the same potential sustainable power sources. Therefore, if you are going to attempt a total conversion or even get off the grid entirely, you will either need to do some do research or call in an expert to make a survey for you.

If you call in an expert, try to get an independent one, so that you can work out the costs of satisfying your energy requirements yourself. You will have to pay for such a survey, naturally, but you could carry out a report yourself with a bit of work on your part. In order to create a solar home, you may find the rest of this piece interesting.

There are fundamentally two kinds of solar design: passive and active solar energy. Passive solar energy can be used to provide heating, cooling and natural light for your home. Active solar energy is used for powering home appliances, tools and lighting. It is the perfect blend of these two types of solar energy that you will attempt to accomplish, if you are trying to convert your home into a solar home.

You can make use of passive solar energy methods in many ways, although they are more easily incorporated in during the actual construction phase of a new home. The largest area of glass should face south or be within 30 degrees of due south. This will catch the maximum amount of heat. This heat can then be circulated around the house by stone floors and stone walls.

The central heating ducting and furnace fan can be used to assist, if necessary. If the house becomes too hot in the summer, awnings or even solar panels could be dropped down in order to put the windows in shadow. When thinking of passive solar energy, you should try to think of means of supplying warmth and coolness without using electricity. For instance, a skylight at the top of the stairs will permit the warmest air in the house to escape, since hot air rises. This will result in cooler air to be sucked into the house at lower levels.

The other feature of a solar house is the generation of electricity by the deployment of solar panels grouped into solar arrays. Solar panels make use of photovoltaic cells to convert light into energy. This energy can then be used to power ordinary electrical appliances of all kinds or some or all of it can be stored in batteries for later use. Conversion from AC (alternating current) to DC (direct current) and back again, if necessary, is a simple matter.

Solar energy can also be used to heat water for the pool or for the home. The most usual type of system uses pipes filled with a type of anti-freeze to collect the sun’s heat and pass it on to tanks of water by means of a heat exchanger.

A solar home uses energy efficiency to reduce the need for heating, cooling and electricity. The use of higher grade insulation, more energy efficient windows, kitchen appliances and lighting than those used in traditional homes, will save you a lot of money and energy. As you can see, some of these changes, especially the passive ones are structural, so hard to apply in many homes, but there is always something you can do to cut your energy bills and slowly convert your home into a solar home.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with a favourite topic – alternative power sources. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

categories: energy,global warming,climate change,alternative,sustainable,solar power,wind power,home and family,health,technology,science,other,uncategorised,fuel

You can live off the grid. You only have to have the grid to purchase electricity if you cannot generate your own. Living on the grid has made too many of us lose our self-sufficiency. We slavishly buy energy off the big suppliers and pay through the nose for it at the end of the month.

How many days a month do you have to work just to pay your electricity bill? What could you do with that time or money if you did not need to use it to pay for your electricity?

The fact is that you can come off the grid and you can even sell your surplus, home-made electricity back to the grid. This is not likely to make you a lot of money, but it is a nice feeling after only paying out for decades. However, the savings of life off the grid do not end there. There are ecological savings and the saving of human life too.

Soldiers would not be sent to fight for oil if we were not so reliant on it. The fact is, that if more people came off the grid, the price of oil would drop, because demand would fall and the oil-producing countries that believe they have a stranglehold on the West would lose their power. And that can not be a bad thing either, can it?

It is easiest for people who live in their own houses to come off the grid. They have more jurisdiction over their own premises and can make their own decisions about what to do with it. Drill a hole here, cut a hole there – that sort of thing. Alterations or home improvements. Life off the grid is also most advantageous for families as they use the most electricity.

The most common ways of attaining a life off the grid is by the use of solar panels, hydropower and wind turbines or even good, old-fashioned wind mills. These items are still expensive to buy and very expensive to have fitted. A recent study in the UK estimated that it would take 10 years to recoup the investment of a professional installation of energy-making equipment.

However, you could remove the expensive labour element by constructing and installing the units yourself! This opportunity is accessible to anyone in the world as the diagrams and schemas for making these units are available on the Internet from specialist alternative energy web sites and the components are practically every day objects.

You will be able to get them in a hobbyist or DIY store. They are also very easy to put together – most teenagers could do it and so could you. If you do not fancy that way, you could purchase a self-assembly kit.

Once you have begun to become independent of the grid, you can make life off the grid even more satisfying by replacing your appliances, as and when necessary, with low energy models. If you tackle life off the grid sensibly, you could add new energy producing devices every month until you do not get any electricity bills any more and then whatever further savings you can make will be sold back into the grid.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with a favourite topic, renewable energy advantages. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

categories: energy,global warming,climate change,alternative,sustainable,solar power,wind power,home and family,health,technology,science,other,uncategorised,fuel

The replacement of traditionally created electricity with electricity made from renewable or different resources is now a viable alternative for many people in the Western world. The main stumbling block is the preliminary expense, which is why solar electricity is still not a practical affair in most other, hotter, countries.

The fact is that fitting solar panels to get your home off the grid is a lot cheaper than it was ten years ago, but it is still not cheap. Some countries have introduced incentive schemes and these are fine, as far as they go, but often they are intended for the middle classes, which is not a section of society as big as the working class and which can afford to pay for its own electricity anyway. These programs leave the preponderance of the members of society stuck with the grid. The new British proposal FITS is like this.

Other countries have so-called ‘Green Options’, which means that you can decide to draw energy from producers of electricity from users of renewable resources only, which is good as far as it goes, but the end user is still stuck in the system of being on the grid and being subject to price rises and power cuts.

If you truly want to get off the grid, do away with monthly bills and recover your freedom from the fat cat oil and electricity suppliers, you have to take a radical approach. The first step is to work out your electrical requirements.

Work out the coldest and the hottest month and use the dearest plus 10% as your goal. The fact is that it could take you years to get off the grid, and by then appliances will be using less electricity than they do now anyway. You can also sell your surplus electricity back to the grid for real satisfaction.

The cost of the professional installation of solar energy systems can be prohibitive and take twelve years or more to recoup, but if you assemble and install your own bank of solar panels, you can more than half that figure. In fact, it is possible to reduce the cost by as much as 75%, if you are willing to assemble and install the solar panels yourself. This is a job that most competent teenagers can do, given the right drawings or schemas.

The best way of going about it, is for you to read up as much as you can on the topic, because there are several routes you can go. The main ones, using solar panels or other means of renewable electricity, are: remain linked up to the grid, using your own electricity first and selling back any surplus; remain linked up, but send surplus electricity to your own batteries, which could be an electric car; or you can come off the grid altogether.

The ultimate objective, in my eyes, is to supply my house with all the home-made electricity from solar panels that I require, to charge my hybrid car’s batteries from the same source and to resell any excess back to the electricity grid.

What a dream!

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with a favourite subject, types of renewable energy. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

categories: energy,global warming,climate change,alternative,sustainable,solar power,wind power,home and family,health,technology,science,other,uncategorised,fuel

It is almost high noon on the energy front. Oil, the substance that is used to produce most of the world’s electricity is becoming too expensive to use to create electricity for home consumption. Even if you believe that there are lakes of oil left, which might be true, the main reason they have not been exploited yet is because it is too expensive to get out. The only thing that makes it a going concern is the high price of oil on the market.

Therefore, it stands to reason that oil prices cannot go down in the long term, which means that our electricity and petrol prices will remain high and will probably keep going up. Add to that the fact that manufacturing is switching to the Far East and the fact that immigration is increasing and the result is lower wages in the West. The likelihood is that the average national wage will not rise as rapidly as the cost of energy.

So what can you do about it? Well, while commodity prices are bound to keep rising, one thing has always kept falling and that is the cost of new technology. Or to be more accurate, slightly old technology. Cutting edge technology is always expensive, but after a few years the price falls, as we saw with desktop computers and as we are seeing with laptop computers now.

The same trend is at work with solar panels. They are far less expensive now than they were a few years ago and they are far more responsive too. And did you know that the components that are used to make solar panels can be purchased from plastic bins at most DIY and hobbyist stores like Radio Shack? If you knew what to buy you could literally go out and bring back enough bits and pieces to make a few solar panels the next time you go out for a loaf of bread.

So why are we not doing it? We did not know that was feasible? Nobody told us? We are not technically minded? We do not have the skill?

OK, all those reasons sound valid. Nobody has been telling us, but the fact is that it is easy to construct solar panels and not that dear any more. Professional installations are still dreadfully expensive – about $45,000 -, but you can do it yourself. There are two approaches you can take.

You can either get a schematic diagram, a plan, from a hobbyist shop or the Internet, buy the components and make your panel or you can buy a self-assembly kit. Sincerely, there are kits about that teenagers can assemble as easily as they do a plastic model airplane. ‘Locate and insert part number 44 into the main board number 3′ – that sort of simple.

If you are new to the world of solar energy, then you may be wondering how solar energy panels work? Solar energy panels are also known as photovoltaic panels; photovoltaic meaning electricity from light. Solar energy panels work by collecting protons from the sun, which displace neutrons, and thereby generate a flow of electrons or electricity. This electricity can either be stored in batteries for later use or used directly.

You can utilize solar panels to heat your pool, run your workshop tools, power the greenhouse lights and fans or if your system is large enough, replace grid electricity in your whole home or business. Most solar energy panels are designed to last upwards of 20 years but involve little to no upkeep.

There is a reduction of the power supply after about 10 years of about 10%, but over the life-span of the solar panels, the energy savings made are enough to recoup the initial cost of the system and more. Furthermore, costs are dropping while energy prices are rising. It already makes financial sense to switch to solar energy power.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with a favourite subject, types of renewable energy. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

categories: energy,global warming,climate change,alternative,sustainable,solar power,wind power,home and family,health,technology,science,other,uncategorised,fuel