once you’ve turned your home into a comfortable, energy-sipping dwelling, it’s time to invest in renewables to offset a portion of your now smaller energy bill. This section can help you to understand the opportunities you have to generate energy for your home. When you’ve passed the decision making, technical, and cost hurdles, living with renewable energy becomes part of a lifestyle that involves a keen awareness of the availability of those resources. Before you know it, you’ll be predicting the weather and looking at your garbage (and coveting your neighbor’s garbage) as valuable energy sources. You’ll also find yourself taking advantage of times of abundance while conserving when resource availability is low. The value of producing your own energy goes way beyond dollar savings and leads you to a place of empowerment, to a place where you can actually take matters into your own hands and meet a good part of your household needs without assistance from the energy industry. Start slow, start small, gather parts and information. Think about your energy future. Then take action.
1.Solar Hot Water
1.Solar Hot Water
Heat from the sun can be used to heat water for your showers or swimming pool or to provide heat for your house. To be clear, solar thermal energy is an altogether different technology than solar electric power (discussed in the next chapter), in which light from the sun is converted into electricity. Using the sun is the easiest way to gain and use free heat and can be very cost-effective. Simply leaving a garden hose out in the sun can provide useful hot water; from there, it’s not such a big step to moving and storing that water with a simple controller and a small pump.
2.Wind Electric Generation
Windmills have been around for a very long time. Relatively short towers once hosted very large rotors with many blades to produce the power and torque needed for things like grinding grains and running machinery. During the 1930s, wind electric generators made their way into rural areas where there were no electric power lines. These low-voltage machines were primarily battery chargers and were used to power low-voltage DC home appliances. Some were dedicated to pumping water. Today there are a handful of manufacturers producing electricity-generating wind turbines for both grid-connected systems and off-grid battery charging applications. The term turbine generally refers to the combination of blade set and generator assembly, while the term generator refers specifically to the electricity-producing unit.
