From Guest Blogger Alia: Solar Energy Panels for Your Home
It is not too difficult to convert your house in a solar-powered one. If you have made up your mind about installing solar energy panels, then the first place to start with would be to check your roof for inclinations. If your roof is not inclined or oriented to make optimal use of the sun’s rays then, the solar panels would have to be inclined and oriented accordingly. If your house does not receive a lot of sunlight for some part of the year, then the PV solar panels would have to be designed in a way that it provides you electricity throughout the year.
A lot of people consider it very expensive to invest in solar panels for domestic purposes – but this is just a myth! Solar panels are now becoming more affordable as Governments are providing subsidies for implementing them. Also, the first year might be a little heavy on the pocket in terms of costs towards purchase and installation – however, over the long run, you will reap multiple benefits. Here’s why you should be installing solar panels in your home:
1. Wise investment
If you compare investing in solar panels to a five-year CD, you will discover that the former has better returns than the latter. Although investing in stocks might provide you greater returns, however, the market is volatile and risky as compared to investing in solar panels that provides you steady returns year after year.
2. Saves on electricity bill expenditure
After installing a solar panel, you will see dramatically lowered electricity bills (at least 50%) and eventually you can minimize your electricity expenses completely. However, savings would vary depending on the location of your house (sun’s orientation) and your requirements.
3. You won’t have to deal with the increases in the cost of electricity
The cost of electricity is always on the rise and has apparently increased by 21% for the past five years. Our fossil fuel reserves are getting depleted, which signal at rising energy costs. With solar energy, you will be safeguarding yourself against the rising cost of electricity.
4. Eco-friendly
You can considerably lessen your carbon footprint by installing solar panels. It is estimated that a regular American household produces around 7.4 tons of CO2 annually through electrical consumption alone. Carbon Dioxide or CO2 is what is causing global warming and adversely implicating the well-being of the planet.
5. Solar energy would help save our natural resources
The sun can invariably power the whole earth, if used by all households. This will reduce out present dependence on coal, petroleum and nuclear energy and thus preserve them for our future generations. Electricity production requires a lot of water and therefore, solar power would also help us to conserve our precious reserves.
6. It increases the saleability of your home
These days, people are getting more aware of the benefits of installing solar panels in the home. If you convert your home in a solar powered one, then you are invariably increasing the saleability value of your home by more than 15%.
7. Solar power will be more affordable
A lot of Governments are trying to persuade homes to use solar energy and therefore, the cost of implementing solar panels could be reduced by 50% due to the tax incentives and rebates. A lot of financing options are also available to help invest in solar panels.
About The Author: Alia is a writer/blogger. She loves writing travelling and reading books. She contributes in Hydroxycut. Her contribution can be also found here Hydroxycut
From the article:
“These days, people are getting more aware of the benefits of installing solar panels in the home. If you convert your home in a solar powered one, then you are invariably increasing the saleability value of your home by more than 15%.”
So if a house is appraised at $300,000, its resale value would be increased by more than $45,000? That seems highly unlikely.
Let us suppose that the average electric bill for the house is $200 per month, which would be really high. Let us also assume that the solar panels completely eliminated the electric bill because they produced all the electricity required by the house, which is also very unlikely. At that rate, it would take more than 18 years for a buyer of the house to recover the additional $45,000 he is paying for the house because it is equipped with solar panels. Actually, if one were to include the maintenance costs of the system, the payback would be even longer. The return on the investment of $45,000 would obviously be so low that there is no need to calculate it.
The investment would be even less reasonable if I had used more reasonable figures. An electric bill of $200 per month is way above average and the electric bill would not actually be totally eliminated by the PV panels. The appraised value of my house is greater than $300,000, so if the PV panels increased its selling price by 15%, that would amount to considerably more than $45,000 which is even more unrealistic.
PV panels have an efficiency of less than 20% whereas solar collectors for heat have an efficiency greater than 50%. Thus, solar panels for heat are more than 2.5 times as efficient as PV panels. Probably solar panels to collect heat would be more economically justifiable than PV panels, but they currently receive little attention, a situation which may be belatedly changing in California.
Perhaps someone else would like to run some numbers based on different house costs and a different monthly electric bill.
Regarding the comparative return on investment of photovoltaic and solar heating, there is a fundamental difference between the two – namely the capacity to use the energy.
With grid connected PV it is always possible to deliver a useful service using the panels due to the ability to export spare power to the grid so that it can be used by someone else.
With solar heating unless you are connected to a district heating network, the useful capacity which can be applied to a home is limited – in summer, once your hot water needs are met, what are you going to do with extra heat? OK, it is possible to use solar heat to run an absorption chiller to provide air conditioning, but so far, such systems are costly and better suited to commercial buildings.
Solar heating can however make a very important contribution in sunny areas, and cost varies substantially according to factors such as water hardness (scale formation) and whether frost protection is required (indirect systems with heat exchangers and anti-freeze.)
As a result, most solar heating systems in temperate climates are specified to cover between 50% and 70% of annual hot water demand. Any more, and the system is far bigger than needed in summer, any less, and the system is economically sub-optimal.
With the recent drop in cost of photovoltaic systems, it is no longer as clear cut which system will give the better return at the scale of a domestic solar install.
Other considerations aside from roof orientation and pitch, and the local climate are
1. Are you integrating solar into a new build?
If so, significant savings can often be made as the required trades, scaffold etc. may well be on site anyway, and the builder can apply for the installation paperwork for a whole bunch of houses in one go. The builder also benefits from economies of scale, and depending on the system selected – such as solar shingles may save on other materials and labor.
2. How costly is the local paperwork for solar arrays?
In Germany and the UK, there is presumed consent so no planning application is necessary – so very low (usually zero) administrative costs to the client and a fast install is possible (my system in the UK was installed within 2 weeks of me buying the house!). The USA has around 17,000 different jurisdictions all with their own policy on planning for solar, as well as potentially standards of inspection of installed systems, and connection codes.
Home Power magazine does a nice job of presenting alternative energy solutions for those who don’t deal with it professionally. They certainly advocate that the priority for best ROI generally be thermal at the top of the list, followed by PV. Even though I was more than aware of this, I still went with PV first, partly due to the frequency of outages in my area. While I was guesstimating that the price of electricity would continue to go up, I have certainly been pleasantly surprised at how much it has gone up and thus made my investment better than originally estimated. Since starting to drive electrically, I discovered the enormously variable nature of that consumption and decided that it would be good to compensate for it with more panels. Offsetting the price of gasoline made the ROI calculation even more interesting, and of course, beneficial.
The last panels purchased were Solar World type – a respected high quality panel. I paid 1.25 per watt for them – no rebates, etc. My earlier panels were 4.50 per watt. We have come a long way.
Fiji is implementing PV power. However, the situation is very different there from what it is in the U.S. and most developed countries.
Currently, Fiji gets much of its power from a hydroelectric system, but that system cannot deliver all the power required since the amount of water is limited although the generator capacity is more than sufficient. When the the hydro system runs low on water, they depend on Diesel power which is exceedingly expensive because of the cost of Diesel fuel. That cost is causing considerable damage to the economy.
Where PV power is used to supplement hydro power, the fact that the PV power is intermittent is less of a problem because, when the PV power is not available, they can rely on the hydro power. The net effect is to reduce the water consumption of the hydro system so that it will be available when the sun is not shining, and to reduce the consumption of Diesel fuel. I have not seen the numbers, but the situation in Fiji is such that PV power may be justifiable economically which does not seem to be the case here in the U.S.
Also, there are remote areas in Fiji where connecting to the grid is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future. In those areas, the two alternatives are Diesel power and PV power. Because of the cost of Diesel fuel and the cost of maintaining small Diesel generators, and because little power is required, PV power makes sense. The people do not have appliances which use much power, such as air conditioning, washing machines, or dish washers, so all they need the power for is for a few small LED lights, small radios, and re-charging cell phones. If the PV power is not completely reliable, i.e., if the rechargeable batteries run down when cloudy weather persists, they can use kerosene lights temporarily. Again, that situation is very different from what we have here in the U.S.
Renewable power sources make perfect sense in some places, but I continue to believe that, because of their intermittent nature, they cannot be practical as an important source of power for large prosperous countries. There really is no substitute for nuclear power.
Look at the picture at the top of the page! Why are they not trippling the output of those collectors with two simple fixed “Barn-Door” reflectors? because the cost would be lower for the same output and they want to maximize profit on sales? Look again at the picture now imagine a shiney FLAT sheet of thin aluminum properly suported extending out from the bottom of the collector horizintally and twice as large as the collector at 1.4 times longer and 1.4 times wider than the collector. now add another similar sized reflector above the panel but nearly vertical and the sunlight reflecting off the two panels brightens the intensity of the sunlight on the active solar pnel increasing electrical output by two to three times. note that nothing is moving to follow the Sun that is because the panels are flat and wider and longer than the active panel simplifying the construction and keeping the additional equipment as inexpensive as possible. A coating of clear laquer on the reflecting panels help to keep them reflecting brightly.
Thank you for your post; I’ve wondered about the same thing myself.
As you point out, well-placed reflectors should be able to increase significantly the output of flat PV systems. How much reflectors would help in cloudy weather I don’t know, but at least they’d help in sunny weather.
PV panels have a limited life. Whether reflectors would affect that life I don’t know, but even if the live were shortened somewhat, it might still make sense to have reflectors.
Thank you Frank, In my reading I have seen it confirmed that the Solar P. V. panels can stand up to seven times more than the average solar levels. havung three times the sunlight does warm the active cells somewhat but the wind cools them .
I was also wondering why, with the actual solar cells enclosed in a weathertite enclosure, why not run a single length of that finned pipe usually used for baseboard heating with hot water, run it along the higher edge to collect heat by convestion air currents warming water in the finned pipe (Or antifreze then connect the pipe as solar domestic water heating (If antifreze is used then include a heat exchanger to interface between the potable water and the antifreze, only needs a tiny circulating pump. And this cools the solar panel and the solar p.V.panel makes just as much electricity anyway.
Years ago I read about a system that was like a conventional flat panel solar collector system to heat water, but it had PV cells attached to the flat panels. How well it worked I don’t know, but obviously the PV cells would get much hotter than usual. Probably it would work OK for heating swimming pools since the water temperature would be much lower. In fact, flat panel solar collectors to heat swimming pools often, or perhaps usually, do not even have glass panels.
Here in Albuquerque, some years before I came here in 2004, some company went around selling and installing solar collectors that heated air instead of water. A blower was used to force the heated air into houses. However, it takes a lot more power to use electricity to operate an air blower than it does to operate a small water circulating pump. That becomes obvious if you compare the size of the blower motor on a hot-air furnace with the size of the pump motor for a hot water heating system. Most of those systems have fallen into disuse because the transparent plastic through which the sun’s rays passed before hitting the back plate were not ultra-violet stabilized and disintegrated.
My house has radiant floor heat which would make it possible to add solar panels and a large storage tank to convert to solar heating.
Heck I spelled my own name wrong above I am DENNIS MILES, not Dennia??? Just a typo, but craig there is no editing possible on this domain once you post it permanent. Consider making some improvements next year, Please.
Actually, I really think that the following article indicates how some, but not all, environmentalists think we should live:
http://www.fijitimes.com/story.aspx?id=221335