How to's of designing your own solar panel power plant

Okay, Here's some tips on setting up your own solar panel power supply for your house.
Take your last electric bill. It should show the monthly totals of kWatthours consumed. There are a few things to take note of when looking at these totals. Look for the months when the kwh(kiloWatthours) consumed was least, look for the months when the kwh was most and all all the months together to get a total of kwh consumed for the year. Each household will be different on these numbers based upon gas or electric heat, A/C or not, the quality of insulation used when your home was built. Your geographical location, is your house surrounded by large trees or out in the open? How much sunlight do you get during a summer day, during a winter day? Is your house located in a valley or canyon (or are you butted up against a hillside) such that you get shaded sunlight in the morning and afternoon rather than direct sunlight? What kind of appliances do you have? Do you have any unusual power loads in your home? Do you want to be able to keep power going when your utility power drops out and its night time? What is your typical could/storm activity over the course of a year? All these things and more effect your solar panel solution and the capacity needed.

Please refer to the tiny little table at the top of this article for the remainder of this discussion. Sorry it's so tiny, I couldn't determine how to insert a spreadsheet into this blog.

So, here in southwest Colorado where I live, actually, in the Arboles area, it has been referred to as the "banana belt". We indeed get our 300 out of 365 days of sunlight, so I will use that percentage 300 divided by 365 equals 82% sunlight in a given year.

So, there is a lot of information in that table. Let me explain. The first column is the total estimated direct sunlight at my location in total hours per day for a given month. The second column is total number of days for each month. The third column is the actual kiloWatthours used that I pulled from my electric bill. The 4th column is the number of potentially generatable kwh if you had 100% sunny days all year. The 5th column is derating the 100% sunny days with a more realistic 82% (300/365) sunny days. The 6th column is the number of kwh over or under produced for the given month. In this scenario the total produced kwh at 82% sunny days generates 1750 extra kwh at the end of the year. This will help accommodate for underproduction as a result of extra cloudy days when electric power generation is less than expected.

So, the first step is to produce a table for yourself like the one above and determine the quantity of power you will need to generate. Next, I'll post on how to calculate number of panels and how to determine the right sized inverter.
That's all I have for now.

Have a great day!
James

These are my choices so far for solar panel solutions

Okay, I promised a hardware list. So, here's what I've found to date:
(Please note that these manufacturers/vendors have no working relationship with me. I have nothing to gain from promoting their products, I just am liking what I am seeing in options and prices associated with these particular brands).

For your inverters:

You may want to consider the Sunny Boy 3000US, or 4000US depending up on the kWatt capacity of your solution. You can find lots of details on the Sunny Boy including pricing here:
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/products.folder/inverter-folder/SB3000US.html
www.sunelec.com, This site has both solar panels and inverters of other manufacturer besides Sunny Boy.

For solar panels:

Sun Electronics, $2.38/watt cost on panels.
www.sunelec.com
http://partsonsale.com/solarhomekits.html

Solar tracking units:
http://www.wattsun.com/residential_trackers.html (we have actually used these tracker kits, they are very thorough and very reliable)

Federal Government website defining incentives and breaks:
www.energy.gov/taxbreaks.htm

Laplata Electric website defining incentives and breaks:
www.lpea.coop/billing_metering/netmetering.htm

That's all I have for now. If you are a DIY and want some help give me a hollar, I'll help out until it consumes too much of my time. I can get great prices from the seller of the sun tracking system through my employer if 8 or more units are being purchased.

Renewable energy solar panel solution $7500!

I'm putting together some real numbers on a spreadsheet today that I will post on here when I get it compiled, but for my region of the US. Durango, Colorado, $15,000 covers practically all the hardware necessary to put a house on solar panel power with a utility grid-tie that permits a person to backfeed any excess power they are generating but not using back onto the utility line through the power meter running it backwards and generating credit that will be used during the night time and other "rainy days". This is what I am coming up with for a 3.28kWatt system with sun tracking on an average sized house. approx. 2800 sq ft. with a kWatt hour total for the year of 7100kWh. With an average of 300 sunny days the solar system could produce up to 8865kWh. This particular household in the lower usage months requires about 500kWh/month and in the high usage months it's 900kWh/month. The high usage was during the two hotest summer months with A/C. The lower usage months were five months in the spring and two months in the fall. This house is heated with gas.

Now, the kicker for southwest Colorado residence is the $3000 rebate from LPEA that applies to this solution and the 30% tax break from the Federal government that applies. It brings a $15,000 hardware cost down to $7,500. Installation costs will vary for each household depending upon existing conditions. For some households roof mounting the panels flat on the south facing roof will be the only option. For others, ample free ground space is available and if zoning restrictions permit, a sun tracking solution would be best. Mounting the solar array on a 6-10 inch steel pole near the house where the sun is visible from sun rise to sun set will gain the owner up to 50% more generated energy than mounting statically. I am nearly ready to spec this hardware out for people on a DIY basis and soon there afterward, I'll have some basic cost estimates for turnkey or item by item labor costs.

I'll do a spread sheet for wind solutions as well, but I'm concentrating on the solar panel solution first.
Feel free to email me with your thoughts and interests. Have a great day!
James jdlmodelt@yahoo.com

Wind energy

I had a friend email me last night asking about wind energy solutions. So, let's talk wind. I am not an expert on any of these renewable energy solutions, but I have a growing fascination with them as our energy resources available to recover become less stable as a result of any given political agenda. Renewable energy sources equate to a certain degree of independence and I enjoy that.

So, wind. There are numerous resources available on the internet concerning all renewable energy technologies. For wind, the basic unit seems to run about $1/watt in cost. That does not include batteries for storage, nor does it include the inverter to convert the generated DC voltage into AC voltage so it will be compatible with your house as well as possible tie-in to your local public utility service in order to get credit when you are generating more power than you use. It seems a lot of these wind generators have about a 5 year life-span. That's a recurring number that I have noticed. When comparing this to solar panel solutions, solar panels seem to be selling for $2.5/watt up to $7.0/watt. Solar panel generators have a life span of 20-25 years.

Things to consider: annual wind or sun conditions in your area. Space available for a solar or wind solution. Some homes are situated in areas where daily or regular wind activity is a given. Some homes are situated where the wind is less predictable, but the sun activity is very regular.

It will need to be decided if the house is going to go off the grid and be completely isolated or if the solar or wind energy will be supplemental to the utility power. If off-grid is selected, energy storage batteries will have to be included in the solution. If this is a supplemental solution then a grid tie-in inverter, most of them include this, will have to be included in the solution. Each of these options adds or removes cost to/from the overall solution. As I mentioned earlier in this article, I am still learning a lot about this topic myself, but my goal is to determine just a few viable solutions for friends and family that they can implement at their homes. I'm not in this to "sell" a solution like I've seen on a lot of websites. There are a lot of people out there "selling" do it yourself solutions. They all claim theirs is the best, so I haven't selected any of those resources yet.

If I were to consider building my own simple wind generator supplemental system, the basics needed would include, an automotive high output alternator, some propeller blades, a DC to AC inverter, and a hefty pole to mount the generator on. Also, some car batteries to store the generated energy. The complication associated with this involve safe battery storage and the utility tie-in. This is just a crude overview of options that exist. It will take me more time to investigate DIY or prepackaged solutions available.

I don't know if this helped at all. I hope to provide much more detail and information and even some truly "free" solutions for people right here, real soon. I don't plan to hit anyone with the "buy my video or book or CD for $20-$50 and find out how to do it", line.

Have a great day!
James