Solar Power Home Projects Renewable Energy


Making Your Own Solar Array

Although there are many contracting companies that offer to install a full working solar cell system at your house, it still is better to make your system since you will be able to customize the solar cells to fit your particular roof or rack without having the constraints of having to use the standard cells that are manufactured by the contractor.


Figuring Out How Many Solar Cells You Need

Finding out how many solar cells you need is much easier than most people think. This is as easy as looking at your utility bills for the past year or so and calculate the amount of energy (in kilowatt hours, kw/h) that you have consumed for that year and divide it by 12. The number that you get is your consumption of electricity per month. You then plug in the amount of electricity produced per square foot of solar cell and divide that number by the monthly consumption. The number that comes out will be the actual square footage of solar cells that you will need for your house.


Figuring Out Your Coverage

When figuring out your energy consumption in order to figure out your square footage of solar cells that you need to build and install at your house it is always a good idea to give yourself a 20% buffer to take into account any future power consumption needs such as having your clothes dryer or water heater switching over to electricity from gas because you will be able to afford running them off of electricity due to your use of the solar cells.


Decide On Amount Of Power You Want To Generate

When figuring out how much solar cells or windmills you want to install to generate electricity in your house, you have to decide whether you want to cut your dependence of the local utility by 50%, 75%, or completely 100%. Many people will still keep a portion of their energy coming from the utility in order to keep other services such as trash collection and sewer hookup.


Choosing Your Mounting Location

When choosing the location to mount your solar cells or your windmills you need to remember that although these items are as close to maintenance free as possible, there still has to be access since they occasionally require some light maintenance. The solar panels occasionally (depending on where you live) need a washing in order to clean off the dust and any debris that may have collected on their surface and windmills need to have the bearings and transfer gears oiled to keep them free.


Installing The Inverter

The only other major component that you need to install when using either solar cells or windmills is a device called an inverter. The job of the inverter, simply put, is to convert the energy coming off of the solar cells and windmill from DC into 115 VAC in order for the current to be safe to use by household appliances.