Anyone use solar panels at home?

Not sure what you mean by "seal" the crawlspace. I'd like to insulate my floor but would never seal up my crawlspace. It needs ventilation. And my furnace is down there.

I have a tubular skylight in my kitchen. Best money I ever spent. Really bright during the day. I tried to turn the sun off for the first few days. Force of habit. I kept going into the kitchen and turning off the switch.....which was already off. The change is phenomenal and I'm glad I had it installed by a professional so I don't have to worry about leaks in my only five year old roof. And I'm sure that the $500 I spent probably increased the value of my home by $2,000.

I'm sure you've all done it but the cheapest, fastest energy savings I did was to install a programable thermostat. The following year I insulated the attic.

I'll probably insulate the attic again....the roof this time. Then under the floor over the crawlspace. I may do the attic myself but I'll probably hire someone to do the crawlspace. I just can't stand crawling under there anymore.

I don't know what it is with real estate agents that they seem to be prejudiced against solar and other technology improvements. Okay, maybe thirty years ago putting in a solar water heater that eventually leaked didn't improve property values...but I think PV and an on demand water heater in today's market does. I think buyers are a lot more savvy about improvements that save energy. And most people that install PV already get some of that investment back before they sell because they don't put it in and then flip the house right away. I can see why it wouldn't pay to install it if you're just flipping.

 

yes ventilation is vital... prevents mildew...but sealing the crawlspace means installing a vapor barrier against the "warm-facing" wall. or in most cases, the underside of the floor.

that means the paper side of the insulation will be on the "occupied side" or the warm side. that is why insulation in the ceilings has the paper facing down into the room. in the crawlspace, the paper would be (if the floor was transparent) facing up into the living area.

 

I have 2.4 kW of Evergreen Solar panels on seasonally-adjustable pole mounts, in series to a grid-tied SMA SunnyBoy 2500 inverter. Installed Oct 2003, utilising "Solar-to-Market Round 2" grants from Massachusetts Technology Collaborative masstech.org to cover about 35-40% of the installation. See a portion of the array in the avatar photo to left

 

We are installing a solar elect system, will generate 20kwh, not sure if we are being smart or oh my god what did we do!
:wacko:
But in AZ APS is in trouble, not enough preventive care and feeding of the system, poor bond rating, massive growth of homes, asking for a 20% increase this year, who knows what next year. If you spec out a 10% increase per year compounded than the system will pay for itself in 10 years. Over 30 years they averaged around 7% increase per year.
If you don't worry about it and pay it off while still working, than you have no elec bill when you are on a fixed income.

There is also talk of being able to sell "green credits" to businesses, i.e. sell your excessive green elect to businesses.. The corp. commission is looking into making APS play fair i.e. pay for the excess elect you generate at a fair rate. Right now they buy at .03 per kWh.

So we are either being very smart or we could have bought more priuses with our money.
^_^

 

This crawlspace was completely insulated on the sides with spray foam insulation, and then had very thick plastic on the bottom. There was no insulation under the floorboards. It was comfortable and not humid at all. It was a builder's personal home, and he was very satisfied with the performance. It was a gigantic house - 6000 sf, and his summer electricity bills in NC (heat pumps, but solar hot water + a swimming pool) were around $130 to $150/month. The HVAC system was completely contained within the insulated building envelope. Not recommending that we all build a house that big, but pretty impressive. I'd look into it more before doing it myself, but it seemed to be performing well for him.

The den I want to do this in is pretty big - about 20x25 or so, plus a foyer and a hallway off of it. I was thinking of putting in 2 tubular skylights, spaced across the length of the room, but then I was worried it would be too bright. How big is your kitchen and what diameter is the skylight? Is it too bright sometimes? Are there ones that you can turn "off"? Enough questions for you? Thanks!

 

My skylight is about 14" across. The kitchen is small, maybe 10x12. For a space like that I'd do two. And they do come bigger. I wouldn't be worried about too bright. My kitchen is all white and reflects light a lot. It's not that it's too bright during the day, it's that it was so dark before I had to get used to it. I truly think it's one of the best investments I made as far as increasing the value of my house....biggest bang for the buck.

I think there are dampers or something you could put inside to create shade but I wouldn't bother. Solatubeâ„¢ came out and looked at the space, gave me options and an estimate. The installation was about 90 min. Piece of cake, but then I had a clean attic with easy access and you can stand up in there.

You could put two big ones (I think they come 16" or 18") in the den and small 10" ones in the hallway and foyer.

 

Thanks! I'll look into it, as soon as I talk my husband into it. It took me about a year to talk him into the prius, so, give me 3 or 4 months!

 

I’ve looked into it at my hobby farm, and regretfully came to the conclusion that given the long winters up here a PV system just wouldn’t cut it.

At present electricity rates.

With Manitoba Hydro demanding monthly service charges of around $6.50, and rates of around 5.6 cents per KWH, it’s hard to “justify†a PV system. Unless you consider such things as environmental responsibility, which few people do.

My home at the hobby farm is not quite 3 years old. The walls are Insulated Concrete Foam, the wall around 12 inches thick if you count the exterior siding and interior drywall. The roof is a nominal R-60, easily capable of double or more the R value as I used foam-core panels. They’re very strong so whether I lay batts or blow in more insulation, it can handle it.

As some posters have already commented, the little things make a big difference: programmable thermostat, air-tight construction, proper building design and orientation to capture winter sun but reject summer sun, etc.

I still see myself pursuing an “off grid†solution, if for any other reason then to achieve a high degree of self-sufficiency.

 

Darrelldd et al.

Couple of ?s for you chaps. First, what manufacturer of panels did you go with? BP, Kyocera, Sharp? Just curious. How big are your systems? How many inverters did you have to use and what type (mfg)?

We're planning to move in the next year or so and Colorado's rebates are just kicking in. $4.50/Watt, which it a'int too shabby. Naturally, once we settle in to a new house I'm definetly thinking about solar. If nothing else I'll probably do the solar water heating. I know that I can afford it.

Bob, I read that yours was 2.1 kW. What was your avg kWh production over a year up there in the Seattle area? Just curious. Here in CO we oughta make out rather nicely.

 

Also, are you guys systems grid-tie or are you off grid?

 

definitely more and more being advertised.


http://www.altersystems.com/catalog/sharp-...CFQ-VGgodDmvEdw

 

Jack,

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this realm and things are in different stages. The biggest problem with solar right now is that supply of silicon feed stock has not been able to keep up with demand. That's driving prices back up. The thin-film crowd (Evergreen Solar et al) are have developed ways of using considerably less silicon in their PV cells. The trade off has been that the conversion efficiencies are a bit lower than the traditional mono and poly crystalline cells (those are the ones that look blue in the sunlight). This stuff is available now. Evergreen has been ramping up production and recently completed a joint venture with a german outfit to built a solar mfg plant in German, where demand for solar is through the roof thanks to the German "feed in tariffs", which pay $0.54/hWh ( ) for solar electricity.

Quantum Dot technology is revolutionizing solar but is a new development look for it a few years down the road. The cool thing about this technology is the theoretical efficiency is 65%. That's a lot better than the theorectical 29% of traditional cells.

The other (OK there are more) area is the PV plastics and the organic PV approach. This is more for small devices that don't need a lot of power. Think of an ipod whose plastic shell can provide some of the energy required to run the device. This stuff will have a lot of neat applications but probably not in the stationary power genertion world.

 

Thx for the link. Looks like the min price/watt on that site is $4.50. How much does the installation cost per watt? roughly?

Looks like an inverter for a 2.5 -3.5 kW system will run about $2K. Does that sound about right?

 

Howdy -

Well, most of your questions will be answered on my solar page:
http://www.darelldd.com/ev/solar.htm

BP panels, one Sunnyboy, 2.5kW grid-tied system. Has been perfect. With Time of Use metering, it has covered our entire household usage AND our main vehicle usage (they each use about the same amount of energy on a monthly basis). So my system not only removes my electricity bill from the house, it also removes my gasoline bill from the car. How cool is that?

a $4.5/W rebate is awesome. We're currently at $4.80, but it is set to go down some percentage every year from hear on out.

 

Darrell,

Very cool. In our current house we chew up about 360-500 kWh/mo. Our house is gas heated but our oven is an electric "radiant" range. The fridge is quite old and we'll replace it with an energy star model. Probably once we've moved. Mind you, we've only got 1300 sqft not a McMansion so that's a major reason costs are down (especially heating). Cooling is done by an evaporative cooler, which saves us a ton on AC. Almost all of our lights are CF except an handful of incandecent ones. I'm interested in checking out the LED option at some point. I know that we've got some ghost load that we could dispose of but I havn't done that yet. I'm psyched that you're doing so much with a 2.5 kWh system. Do you guys have a battery backup system for the notorious cali black/brown outs?

Also, I bet we have similar amounts of sunlight. I'd be interested to see an production curves that you might have "lying" around. :lol:

So that's what an EV1 looks like. Made me think of France (car seems to have that French look) and, of course, the Insight.

 

Hey Tripp. You're doing OK at 500 kWh. It is those phantom loads that'll kill you. I think we need to take computer peripheral guys to task. Why do we need wall warts for every damn device? Those sit and hum away 24 hrs/day doing nothing. Most use just as much energy "off" as they do when on! Standardize on ONE DC voltage, and put ports for those on the back of the computer power supply. Imagine how much that would clean up office wiring, and the energy savings when multiplied by millions would be significant. But I digress...

I'm away from home right now, but remind me later, and I'll show you my production numbers. There are many sites out there where you can calulate solar influx for your location though. They work great. See if you can dig one up.

No battery back up here. Those famous blackouts you hear about? Well, in the past ten years my power has been "out" for a total of about six minutes (spread over four occurances) and we had one brown out. Battery backup would be a huge waste of money for me, as our power is very reliable. A backup system would have doubled the price of our installation.

If you want to see more pictures of the EV1, please go to my EV site (link in sig) and click on the EV1 button on the left... then chose your link at the top.

Now... LEDs. I like those almost as much as EVs! If you look at the Rav4EV/mods section of my site, you'll see that all of my interior lighting is eeprom-controlled LED lighting. My dastardly plan is to design and build some LED drop-in modules for the Prius. Toyota didnt' make it very easy in that vehicle though! Why we don't have any sort of dome light standard is beyond me!

OK, I'd better end my wide-ranging ramble here before I get completely out of control! Plus I need more coffee.

 

The first house I bought in SLC - as a Fixer Upper - had a swamp cooler. They work well in a dry climate, but I always worry about the health effects from using them.

I hope you regularly take the pads off and clean them, and also bleach the resevoir once in awhile, right?

 

I've never had any problems and during the hot part of the summer we run it full out day and night. I prefer it to the dryness of an AC and it's so much cheaper to run than an AC.

I need to replace the pads this coming season. Other than that I drain the tank once per season. The throughput is about 1 tank/day when during the height of the summer.

 

So it sounds like you're keeping the water reservoir clean, along with the pads. That's important.

When I bought that home in SLC, 1987, there was a disgusting greenish mold growing in the reservoir and on the pads. Guess what my first shopping trip was for?

Bleach and new pads.

Worked fine, especially once I changed the belt and lubed the motor. It gave off a horrible screeching sound, must never have had oil.

 

Sounds pretty bad. It's not that I do a lot, it's that it's so dry here. There's a bit o' dust in the air (probably just like in SLC) so a l'il sediment ends up in the tank and gets on the walls just below the vent into the house. At the end of the summer I have to scrub the walls. <_<

That's been the only downside thus far. Well that and the fact that it doesn't make energy that I can sell for millions of dollars.