Go Greener Tips

If you wanted to introduce clean energy at home, which type of energy would you go for?

Would you know which would be the most efficient for your location and lifestyle, or how to apply it to your home?

In this simple set of instruction to clean energy I will show you where to start, and how to discover what’s best for you!

Of course you can start little then build up your scope, or with confidence, you could just blast into a large project straight away. If you know nothing about clean energy at home then you could simply start by powering your garden shed or garage, but if you are confident enough, you can go completely off-grid!

But which type of energy should you use?

The clean energy choices for you would would be from…

* Solar
* Wind
* Geothermal
* Biodiesel

…which can be applied to your electricity supply, water heating, or space heating.

Solar energy can be applied to supply electricity, or domestic hot water.

Wind energy would be applied to supplying electricity.

Geothermal energy would be applied to supplying space heating.

Biodiesel is an alternate fuel that can be used in any oil-fired heating boiler (with modifications), or the family diesel powered car.

Solar Energy

To produce electricity, solar photovoltaic (PV) panels can be constructed by any DIYer for as little as $100, where the proprietry equivalent could be $300+. These are wired together with a charge controller, storage batteries and a power inverter to produce mains electricity.

The power provided in kilo-watts, depends directly on the quantity of PV panels utilized in the system. You can easily power the garden shed with a couple of panels, where an array of say 10 – 20 panels would be required to supply a small house.

Solar can be used at any latitude, but is obviously effective for a greater period of the year in a desert location than in say Illinois or Montana.

Wind Energy

Wind turbines work well in low to medium strength winds. In gales they furl out to reduce the stresses on their component parts.

The main advantage over solar is that turbines produce electricity night and day. If your location has winds for much of the year then wind would be a suitable solution.

Wind and solar in a combined system have the ability to supply electricity for all but the unusual period when there is neither wind or sun.

Geothermal Energy

A few feet below surface level the ground is a constant temperature of between 10-12 °C (50-54°F), and this can be extracted and amplified using a heat pump to circulate fluid through underground pipes. Used in conjunction with an existing space heating system it will reduce heating bills considerably.

In addition, you can reverse the heat pump process in summer to circulate cooled water around the heating system to reduce the reliance on air conditioning.

Biodiesel

You take the waste product from restaurants or other biological oil using industry, then using a home processor, you convert it into biodiesel. It’s a double edged green winner, because you put to useful purpose an otherwise waste product, cut out buying the equivalent fossil derived product, and save a ton of money!

The biodiesel will run any car, tractor, truck or boat built after 1993 without modification. Alternatively it can run your oil-fired heating boiler with only a small modification to the burner.

Going Off-Grid

I have been living off-grid now for 5-years using an integrated solar and wind system to charge up a bank of storage batteries. This 24-volt supply is then inverted into mains electricity to supply the house.

In truth, there are occasions when I have to run a back-up generator, but it is a small expense compared with buying from the utility company. The generator would be perfect for using your home produced biodiesel!

If you don’t want the complication of a back-up generator, why not remain connected to the grid, but utilize an import/export meter. This way you can export the excess power you produce to the utility company, then when you have a shortfall of power, you simply import from the grid as usual.

This will save you a ton of money and may even put you in credit!

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