Go Greener Tips

Alternative Energy For The Home – Options Abound

With an economic recession, everyone is trying to cut back on their month to month expenses. Many people anticipating a layoff or a reduction in hours are taking advantage of tax credits and incentives to improve their homes to cut costs on electric bills and utility bills down the road.

These methods start with upgrading insulation and making the windows of the home more energy efficient. These changes and upgrades provide the single greatest bang for the buck to cut costs on electric bills; shortly after that comes using more efficient appliances and especially lighting fixtures. However, many people want to go beyond those efforts, and the government wants to encourage this – hence the strong interest in alternative energy for the home.

Alternative energy for the home comes in one of two forms: Solar power systems (which are further divided into solar thermal projects and photovoltaic ones) and wind power turbine systems. Both of these systems have the potential to cut down your energy costs, and in many areas, allow you to sell electricity back to your local power company, sometimes at the full residential rate.

The most efficient (and least expensive) of these alternative energy for the home systems is solar thermal. In solar thermal energy capture systems, you run a working fluid through black tubes to absorb sunlight; usually this working fluid is water, and there’s a small solar electric system to power the pumps to move the water around. Water gets heated up by the sun and then it gets routed down to your hot water tanks. Because the largest expense for most homes is creating hot water, this is an excellent way to cut costs on electric bills. This type of energy capture system is also the most efficient, converting about a third of the sun’s rays into hot water.

Photovoltaic systems convert sunlight into electricity. They’re about half as efficient as a solar thermal system for a given size of installation, but they do create electricity, which is more generally useful than hot water for household uses; your hot water heater will never power your computer, for instance. Like a solar thermal system, photovoltaic systems need a way to store that energy for when it’s most useful – that means a battery bank. They also need an inverter, to convert the DC current into AC for your appliances.

That need to convert DC to AC for general consumption is a common theme in discussing alternative energy for the home. Even with (or especially with) wind turbine systems. While the sun’s power delivery cycle is predictable, wind power is not, and there are a lot of concerns with overvoltage. Wind power systems use a modern wind mill (in one of about four configurations) to generate electricity with an electrical motor as the blades are turned. Wind power systems have the advantage of being fairly cheap to put up in a residential environment, but may run into hazards with your local home owner’s association. (There may be similar issues with solar systems, but they’re more widely accepted.)

Contrary to popular myth, wind power systems aren’t really hazards to birds or other wildlife, but like all outdoor systems need to be weatherproofed.

Renewable energy indeed is effective and has helped thousands of household nowadays in cutting their electricity bill. It is not necessary that we will be enslaved by electricity suppliers with their expensive electricity. We can always study basic solar energy facts and renewable energy information on http://www.freealternativeenergyresources.com/ and learn how to save and use electricity wisely.

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