Solar Energy

I would like to learn about solar energy and how I can make some panels for my home, of course with in a reasonable budget. My goal is to be able to run a refrigerator and fan off of battery. Any ideas out there?

If your goal is to save money, it will be hard to do that with solar electricity. You can come out ahead under some circumstances, but powering a refrigerator and a fan is an unlikely one. However, if your goal is to learn about this kind of setup, you could get a kit from (say) Harbor Freight for a few hundred dollars, which will (barely) charge a car battery over a period of a couple weeks. The energy you collect could power a fan for several hours.

You could also learn about solar electricity just by searching the web. That way, you don’t need to spend any money at all. Our solar setup is documented at

http://www.angelfire.com/ca2/roderick/solar/photovoltaic.html

That said, there are ways you can save money on energy. A solar hot water heater usually pays for itself over time, depending on where you live. You can buy a kit to retrofit your existing water heater for perhaps $2000 or so.

Also, if your refrigerator is old, just changing to a new, extremely efficient model can save 1/3, maybe even 2/3 of the energy.

As a society, we use large quantities of fuel to heat vast amounts of water each day.The heated water is used for a variaty of purposeses, including the genaretion of electrecity. What advateges and disadvanteges are there to using solar energy to heat water? please help..

Advantages
- Solar energy is renewable (i.e. it will not deplete)
- Solar energy is clean (it does not give out pollutants)
- Solar energy is readily available (there is sunshine quite often)

Disadvantages
- Solar energy is difficult to harness (technology is kind of advanced now, but still, the energy absorbed is quite little)
- Solar energy cannot be stored (if we rely totally on solar energy and we can’t store it, what are we to do on a dark day or at night?)

ok…

it needs some experimentations, however it seems to work very well…
This NaCl peculiarity comes from its high value of the heat of fusion(about 300 kwh/m3 – in addition a little salt mine can easily contain 100 millions m3 of salt…) .
It means that solar energy can be used to melt the salt, then it can release heat constantly…

Do you agree?………..

If you could find a cheap way to store the salt, insulate it and melt it, you might have something. I think the limiting factor would be storing it as a liquid. What would it be contained in? Would it be cheaper than pumping water up a hill?

Please give me the link and logic explanation on the matter thanks. Experience person in renewable energy most welcome to answer.

Well thats an interesting idea, but i consider it an unefficient design..

A wind turbine produces electricity, and so does a photovoltaic cell..
combinging them would not help.. it is as if you are installing two batteries to supply a certain machine..
you will gain more electricity but it has nothing to with combining them together..

a point i have to make that might link the two is the following:
Wind turbine: works best in windy days, mostly winter time..
PV cell: works best in sunny days, mostly summer time..
in case you require an electrical load that would not go below a certain load no matter what the weather was. this combination would help..

1. Solar energy is not cost effective due to the cost of equipment and the cost fossil fuels needed to create solar energy cells in the first place. If you were to install solar panel on an average home in Phoenix AZ and you calculated the cost + fossil fuels used in creating the solar equipment it would take from 5-8 years to show a profit. Other cities that get less sun than the desert would take even longer and the cost would go up as you also calculate Maintenance dollars.

2. In order to generate enough energy to effectively curb our need for fossil fuels would not be economically prudent or reliable with the given solar technology as we know it today.

3.Hydrogen fueled cars and and big trucks is the main target of defeating the need for foreign oil. Solar energy will never be able to generate enough energy to supply hydrogen refueling stations.

Yes.

I just wanna see if they are worth buying I have an Asus 1008HA if that helps thanks a lot to whoever answers

it would take severak hours

solar batteries can cost upm to thirty thousand dollars.where as ive seen people use a car battery wit an inverter to run electricals.also it is possible to to recharge through a utility hookup at discount price from the utility company,and some batteries have built in recharge capability

There is no such thing as a solar battery- Deep-cycle batteries are used to store electricity for solar applications. A battery stores energy, a solar panel converts energy from the sun into direct current- An inverter converts Direct Current into Alternating Current. A grid-tied solar system doesn’t require batterries, and a stand-alone system does. Utility companies generally will credit you $2.00 a watt from your system.

I am interested in this as a contribution to global warming.

I have heard several commentators mention this as a problem in passing, but can find no sources on the magnitude of the problem.

I am also interested in the impacts of generating energy from sources that create combustion heat, such as nuclear and biofuel; or geothermal that released a lot of heat at once.

Tiny.

First, not much of the Earth would have to be covered:

http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_land_area/

Second, while solar cells are dark, they convert a substantial percentage of the energy falling on them to electricity. So their absorption of heat is smaller than you’d think.

Mankind’s total use of energy is about 1.5% of the energy now attributed to global warming (previous Yahoo question). So that’s minor, also.

Global warming basically is using CO2 to leverage the energy of the sun everywhere on Earth. It’s a lot of energy and other things pale in comparison.

we installed a pv solar system for a customer, but his meter is speeding up instead of running backwards like all the other systems. what could cause this?

Hey Jared, frustrating problem you have there isn’t it? Let’s narrow the field a bit. I assume you have an array of some size connected to a grid tie inverter. There are two possibilities here. One, your system is actually pulling power in from the grid when it should be going out. Two, the meter installed on the house is a newer type, which in some cases looks like the old electric-mechanical ones we grew up with, but differs in how the logic inside works. Here is a simple test you can do. Go to the house at a time when you have good midday sun. Have the homeowner turn off all nonessential loads. This will put your system in a state where it should be producing enough power to feed the home and the grid simultaneously. Now examine the meter and see which direction and how fast it is spinning. It should be spinning in a direction that indicates power feeding out to the grid. You won’t know which way is which yet, but you will in a minute. Next, have someone turn off the inverter, so that you know no power is feeding back onto the grid, and examine the meter while this is done. If the meter spins faster, but in the same direction, all is well, it means the home was using more power than the array was providing, but deactivating it increased the amount of grid power the house needed to keep running. In this case I would suspect the home has some unknown load someplace, such as an attic fan running continuously, or a well pump with a bad check valve, and so forth. If the meter slows down when you turn off the solar, than it means one of two things. First, that your solar system is actually drawing a load someplace. Without seeing the system you installed I couldn’t begin to guess where the problem might be. I would suspect the inverter or AC wiring from the inverter to the house. Second, that the meter on the house is a new type that only runs in one direction, and it sees the extra power from the grid as more load power.

The third thing that could happen is the meter reverses direction when the solar is turned off. This indicates that the system is working well also, but the homeowner simply is using additional power someplace after hours.

As a side note, after doing this test by turning the inverter on and off, try also turning off the AC feed from the house to the inverter while it is running and see if the results are the same. If you get a different result, it might indicate that the solar array is in fine shape, but the AC wiring to the inverter or the inverter itself are suspect.

I’m wondering, you said, "We" installed this array, are you a solar installer for a living? If so you might put in a call to the inverter manufacturers tech support and throw this at them, if problems like this have occured before with their product, they usually know about it.

Good luck Jared, and take care, Rudydoo

i want to know if solar energy and solar power are the same thing…PROOF please..or maybe not

solar energy: energy from the sun that is converted into thermal or electrical energy

solar power: energy from the sun that is converted into thermal or electrical energy

So yes, both solar energy and solar power is the same in definition.