How to Make Your Own Free Energy With Solar Power Panel Cells
Whether you think you should be living in a more environmentally friendly way, or you want to reduce your energy costs, adding solar panels or photovoltaic panels can help you achieve your goals. With the proper materials and setup, you can even transfer your home off of the utility grid, or at least move in that direction. Solar energy is clean, renewable and free once you have paid for your solar panel system. Does this Spark an idea?
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Things You'll Need
- LED light bulbs
- Compact fluorescent light bulbs
- Energy saving appliances
- Power strips
- Photo voltaic solar panel system components
- Battery pack
- Panels
- Inverter
Instructions
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Reduce your energy consumption. Replace your incandescent light bulbs with LEDs or compact fluorescent lights. Invest in energy saving appliances. Make sure you turn off televisions and lights when you are not using them and keep your doors and windows shut when the air conditioning or heat is on. You can even put TVs, VCRs and other remote controlled devices on power strips and turn the power strips off when you are not using them, since remote control capability requires a constant flow of electricity.
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Decide what type of solar panel system you need. There are systems that tie into the electrical grid, systems that go off the grid and hybrid systems that also incorporate wind power. If you want to start smaller and less expensively, you can begin with a system that ties into the grid and gradually build it to off-grid with either solar panels only or a hybrid system of solar panels and a wind turbine.
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Calculate the wattage of the system you need. Look at your last six electric bills and average them to figure out how many kilowatt hours you use every month. Figure out what percentage of those kilowatt hours you want to cover with solar power. Multiply the kilowatt hours by the percentage to figure out how many kilowatt hours you need to cover in a month. Use a Solar Insulation map or chart like the one on Big Frog Mountain or Rocky Grove Sun to figure out how many hours of peak sunlight you get. Multiply the kilowatt hours you need to cover by 43 and divide by the number of hours of peak sunlight for your area. This is the minimum wattage of the system you need.
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Buy your system components and either hire an installation specialist, or install your photo voltaic system yourself. You can find systems as complete packages or pieces. If you want an off-grid system, either as solar only or a hybrid package, you need a battery pack, as well as the panels and inverter.
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Tips & Warnings
You can hire an energy auditor to find badly insulated areas and leaks in your home and further increase your energy efficiency for heat and air conditioning.
You can also plug the numbers for figuring out the minimum size of the system you need into the calculator on Wholesale Solar to have it figure it out for you.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Solar Panels image by alessbonaventura from Fotolia.com
