Building Solar Panels Stops You From Burning a Hole in Your Pocket

Building Solar Panels Stops You from Burning a Hole in Your Pocket

In this article we'll take a look at some of the sorts of home solar power system you can get for your home; whether you should be paying to get someone else to install it, or if you should you be building solar panels yourself; and finally what you can expect to save by having a home solar power system over conventional sources of power.

Ok, we all know that if we don't switch to some other form of power in the next few years, the world will end, well, that may be a tad extreme, but the figures for the rate of fuel consumption verses the known level of available fossil fuels doesn't make great reading - even for us non accountant brained people. So what can we do about it?

What type of home solar power system can we get?

If you want to do your bit for the world you can install one of two ways of producing solar power for homes. The first can heat your water and the second will collect power and store it in batteries, to be reused as and when you need it - simple, isn't it?

The water heating solar panels will, generally, heat a certain amount of water that's already in the pipes that are exposed to the sun. This water will be fed into a storage tank using either a flat panel collector (with the storage tank on the roof) or an evacuated tube system that feeds the hot water into a slightly more conventional internal tank. In both cases the water is continually circulated through the pipes and the tank to make sure that the water stays hot.

The method you use is as much down to the type of climate you live in, as anything else. The evacuated tube system works better if you're living somewhere that's prone to freezing - and let's face it, if you're looking at building solar panels for your home, you're probably doing so because you've felt the bite of ever increasing power bills, and are likely to be living in areas where it freezes - a lot.

Solar panels that produce electricity are a whole different thing, entirely. Instead of heating up water passing through a length of pipe, these panels use electrical charges to pass energy through to a battery.

Building Solar Panels

This is a slightly techie bit, but do stick with it, especially if you're going to be building solar panels as it really is quite interesting, I promise; the panels are covered with small silicon cells that are combined with other elements to give the cells a charge (because silicon on its own is neutral), and this usually makes that cell negatively charged. In order for the electricity to flow the negative cells have to have a positive plate attached to them. When this new combined cell is hit by a photon it allows electrons to move, and we have the start of the flow of electricity.

Ok, maybe the process wasn't that interesting (unless, maybe, you want to make your own solar panel), but the end results certainly would have been as they were stored electricity feeding power to your computer so that you could read more about building solar panels, and saving money with them.

To pay, or not to pay, that is the question.

Now that you have some idea of the type of solar power you need for your home, the question is whether you're going to get someone in to install it.

There is one major plus in getting someone else to install it, that being that they should know what they're doing. The biggest minus with doing this is usually the cost involved.

In the past, when solar panel installation created enough buzz to get the neighbors' out watching, it would have been a good idea to get them installed by someone else.

The information you needed to install them, or, indeed, for building solar panels yourself, wasn't as readily available, and many companies would have factored it in as part of the initial cost. Now, however, that isn't a problem.

Not only are some people installing their own off-the-shelf solar panels, some are even building them themselves. And this leads on quite nicely to...

How much money can you expect to save by adding solar power?

This is something that's a bit difficult to give an exact figure on, and here's why...

What you need to do is to work out how much you're paying at the moment, how much buying and installing solar panels will be, and then divide the buying and installation cost by the monthly power bill you have at the moment. Doing this should tell you how many months at your current usage of energy it will take before you've paid the buying and installation costs - that's allowing for the power costing you nothing, with the sun doing all of the work.

Did you follow that? Yes? Good, now the bit that complicates it.

If energy prices increase then the calculations change, because you would be paying more for the electricity from the power companies it now means that you would recover the costs on buying and installation quicker... wait... we aren't finished... if you installed it yourself you would also have a lower cost on the actual solar panel because you didn't pay for labor...

Don't go away yet... if you built and installed it you would only have paid for the parts... final bit, I promise... in some cases you can actually sell your excess power back to the power companies meaning, in a round-a-bout way, they actually paid you to have install solar power in your home. Pretty nice of them, wasn't it? Just imagine if you were to make your own solar panel, you would be earning money from the electricity companies!

So what have we discovered from all of this? First, there are two types of solar power for homes to look at, second, it pays to make your own solar panel, and finally, it could be the power companies that pay for your solar power system.

So what are you waiting for, start building solar panels for your home, today.




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