Has anybody researched solar panels or put them on their house? I am looking at buying a house and was kinda mulling over the idea of throwing some panels up, especially with electricity prices on the rise, etc. Thoughts, ideas, can I roll it into the home loan, etc?

I'm no fucking hippie and its not about some idealistic "green planet". I just wanna try and cutdown/eliminate my utility bills as much as possible.

10/2/2005 10:14:08 AM

get the solar roof shingles

10/2/2005 10:17:15 AM

a good resource right at NCSU
http://www.ncsc.ncsu.edu/

10/2/2005 10:26:38 AM

I did a huge research project on solar power when I was a senior in hs. Pretty much you would have to have a house built to have the full effects of solar power, but you would definitely be able to do it without it. There are two main types, active and passive.

Passive pretty much involves no energy conversion. It involves the strategic location of mirrors, and windows in order to use sunlight as a source of regular light and heat. Of course this isn't too effective on a cloudy day or at night, so that is where active solar power comes in. This is the more well known type that has solar panels. You would have to get a house that doesn't have much shade (obviously), as solar power by conventional standards is still rather innefficient. From what I remember, the panels charge huge batteries with sunlight, which are in turn used to power stuff. If you had a few days of bright sunlight, then a few days of rain, the stored energy would kick in. This wouldn't be too effective if you were in a kind of gloomy climate like Pittsburgh or something, but say out in a desert it would be fine. If you had like a week of constant overcast it might become a problem.

Ideally, if you still wanna do it, you might want to hire an electrician (or do it yourself if you know how) to do some wiring so that the solar power is used to power nonessential items that you can live without if necessary and just use regular power for things like lights. Be prepared to shell out $texas though, it will take like 10-20 years for it to pay for itself. If you aren't planning on living in the house for a long time, forget about it.

10/2/2005 12:10:34 PM

Well the newer units start off at like 8 grand and do not use a battery system. The hook into the grid and just backfeed power into the system turning your power meter in reverse. Then at night you run through that surplus that you acquire during the day, hence balancing it out without the need for expensive and space-consuming batteries.

10/2/2005 5:30:46 PM

^ thats cool

how much power are you making with these things

10/2/2005 6:01:45 PM

Depends on the setup. I figure at our house we average no more than 900kwh a month that we use. On MrSolar.com they have a setup that runs about 45k that would make more than that in NC.

I wanna go talk to somebody and make sure that I have enough sunlight and room on the southside of my roof to put one of these systems up. If so, I might go talk to my loan officer about covering it in my mortgage.

NC has some tax incentives to cover the cost of it, and if I got one of the big systems like this, I would switch my gas pack to a heat pump. Then I could pretty well run anything I wanted to on electricity and would be able to cover my ass on the electric bill. My concern is I need to justify the cost against the savings of wiping out my electric/gas bills. Electric alone is gonna run me about 120/month plus the 300/month+ for my damn gas bill. So figuring that in, I'll probably save about 3k to 5k a year in home heating/power. But compare that to a price somewhere around 45k for the system and what it would raise my mortgage. Thats what I gotta figure out, and if it will be worth it to raise the value of my home. I do probably plan on staying here for a while, but if I don't, I wanna know I won't lose my ass on the house if I install this stuff.

10/2/2005 6:54:17 PM

i dont know anything about solar panels, but are there any maintenence costs that one should consider when buying it?

10/2/2005 7:05:36 PM

i heard the power company gives you a rebate for having solar panels, check into that.

10/2/2005 7:17:21 PM

be it known that even if one leaf lands on a panel, it will drop dramatically in performance (memory is saying somewhere around 80% loss)

10/2/2005 8:14:17 PM

Quote :

"The hook into the grid and just backfeed power into the system turning your power meter in reverse"

Power companies must love having their own kwh rate thrown back at them.

[Edited on October 2, 2005 at 8:18 PM. Reason : .]

10/2/2005 8:15:12 PM