I’ve always kind of wanted to do this. How much does it cost? Is it practical?
What if you had a large plot of land, and stuck panels throughout it?
Though if you had a large plot of land you could also do wind power… Hmm… Well wind is more of a vertical space requirement, and solar is more of a horizontal, so maybe you could do both. I dunno.
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December 3rd, 2011 at 12:15 pm
It’s not real complicated, but it is expensive. Mainly because of the cost of photovoltaic cells.
You can make solar air heaters very easily and very cheaply. And solar water heaters aren’t prohibitively expensive.
But photovoltaic arrays are very expensive for the power they create. You can look them up on Ebay and elsewhere and very quickly get an idea. And those systems also require a battery bank, to save power for when the sun isn’t shining, and an inverter to turn it to AC for actual use, unless you want to set up a 12v DC system.
In a lot of places you can skip the battery banks and instead use your array in conjunction with the public utilitiy’s grid, using the public grid when the array is not producing. In some places you can sell excess output from the array back to the grid.
December 3rd, 2011 at 12:55 pm
No it’s not difficult thought it does have problems.
1) Extremely expensive: Finding all the solar panels to power 3-5 KW’s is a tough and expensive job often requiring around 32 good solar panels (If 9 panels: 1.5 KW). This will cost well over thousandsds of dollars, Just for the panels!
2) Roof space: Fitting that much solar panels on a roof facing the same direction (not always) will take up a lot of space.
They are such houses that exist:
see:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
2.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design
December 3rd, 2011 at 1:08 pm
no its not difficult at all, but it would be very expensive tho. such a gud way to be green and to help create better world and better environment…
December 3rd, 2011 at 1:18 pm
You require roof very much bigger than house.Solar batteries and panels are costly even with govt subsidy.
December 3rd, 2011 at 1:58 pm
I would do both wind and solar. Here is a good source of information you might check out.http://makewindmillsite.org/. I am looking into this also, and my plan is to use wind, and solar to charge up a battery bank, which will run a 400 watt inverter, which will run low power lights, and if you have a winter environment where you will need heat, then a wall where you can get solar effect from the sun in daytime.
December 3rd, 2011 at 2:14 pm
It is very easy and straight forward. It also is very expensive.