Hey!
Im doing a project on solar power.. i have 3 questions left to answer but i am completely STUMPED!! so the q’s are:
·how professionals do it
·what is involved in building a solar house
·what do builders hope to achieve by building a solar home
and if anyone has any input on solar power or any statistics, that would be a great great help!!
thanks!
4 users commented in " Solar Power-related question!!? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback1. How do professionals do it? No clue.
2. What is involved? Depends. Do you want solar power to provide heat only, or electricity also?
Generally you have to position a bank of solar collectors that will effectively gather the energy and then distribute it to the house. I don’t think that solar cells produce AC at 60 Hz. More likely DC. If producing electricity from solar, then you wire it into the house wiring upstream from a circuit breaker panel. Since the solar generated electricity may not be sufficient to completely power the building you may need to keep the two types of circuits discrete from each other so that you do not “backfeed,” from the utility grid to your cells.
3. The only reason to build a solar home is that if you do it correctly the building needs practically no electricity from a utility. Hence no bills from said utility. If the home is truly self-sufficient it has that attractive and desirable feature, which may compensate for the elevated price tag of the house.
First you have to decide if you want active or passive solar, or maybe a combination of the two.
Active solar would be solar panels on the roof that heat up water that is pumped into coils to heat a swimming pool, for example.
Passive solar can be as simple as designing eaves of a house that shade the windows in the summer and expose them to the sun during the winter, using the different elevations of the sun from summer to winter.
There is an incredible amount of work to design a solar house, optimum window size, using the right colors in the house, window direction, glass reflectivity, there are volumes on this subject.
The builders hope to achieve the lowest energy bills possible, for heating, hot water, cooling, electrical use, etc.
Do you want to use Solar Panels? Or want to use Large Parabolic Mirrors?
In latter choice, you have to reflect light from sun and focus it to (for example) heat the water and produce steam and run turbine…….
These are normally government funded projects useful on large areas to produce reasonable amount of power.
If you want to use solar panels, you have to purchase pannel of suitable size from market. They are available in various sizes and power ranges.
Then you need to have system which converts DC power from Pannel to useful DC voltage and current (DC-DC) converter so that solar Pannels are used most efficiently. You may search keyword MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking). You need DC to AC converter, which converts power from pannel and battery to useful AC power to be used domestically.
You may have other features in pannel for example Solar Tracking such that solar pannel turns to direction of sun, as sum moves
If you want to do solar pannel based project, contact me at and clearly mention ‘Subject’ in e-mail. I’m also doing Solar based project, involving MPPT and Solar Tracking.
For statistics, my 40 panel, two inverter, 6 kW system in an insolation area of 5 generates an average of 20 kWh per day.
Bring on a net metering system I did not need batteries. I am able to get all the electricity I need. In fact used about 60 kWh less than I used last period.
A solar house was constructed in Lafayette CA, using solar power for the construction. A shed and solar array were built first. Power from the system was used for all the electrical tools used during construction.. Afterward the panels were mounted on the house.
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