Solar Powered Ventilation
Photo: Getty Images
How would you like the sun's power to run bath fans, floor fans, and ceiling fans in your home. Fans are widely used throughout the home to move air around for comfort, moisture, and smell control. Think ae heating and coling within your home and cut down on the utility bills.bout how many ceiling fans run in your home each day. Now, think about how many bath fans run throughout the day, How about floor fans and fans above the stove? I think you'll agree, we all use fans to either keep us cool, circulate theair or disguard unwanted air. With solar powered fans, you can optimiz
Heat Your Swimming Pool With Solar Energy
Swimming pools are one of the greatest joys of summer for children and parents alike. Everyone is excited the first day the pool is opened, except when the pool is just to cold to jump into it. To fix that problem, youcan add a solar blanket that will warm the water, much to everyone's delight. This heating works directly through the blanket and no other installations are needed. However, if you'd like to get a little more high tech, simply install a solar hot water heating system. This utilizes solar hot water heating panles that are munted onyour roof to collect the sun's heat and then is circulated to the pool. As the water is slowly pumped from the pool, heated and then returned from the panels, the pool temperature is increased.
Solar Energy Can Heat Your Water
Have you considered the possibility of solar energy heating your water instead of using gas or conventional electric water heaters? I know you may say that you'll have to buy all of these pieces to get this option to work. There will installation that you may or may not be able to do. And the cost, well maybe you should just stick to the one you have now, right?
Not so fast! If you think about it, it's no different than changing out an outdated furnace, water heater, or air conditioning unit. You may increase the efficiency by 15-30% by replacing the unit, but there is an up-front cost associated with that change as well. Although, the change will save you money over the years, so that should be considered over a period of time.
Solar Energy Can Heat Your Home
Solar heating is referred to as passive space heating and in this example, I'm going to try and explain how this works. One way is to use hot water heat in your home that can be created by using sun-heated tubes of water on your roof and pumping it into your water heater.
With the addition of a sun room, we'll refer to it as a solar room, for example, the all glass room allows the daylight hour sunshine to filter in and warm the room through a collector called a transparent covering in the glass. Now, if we add plants and rocks for a nice visual, the rocks will actually store the heat of the sun and that energy can be used when the sun goes down to heat the room. Stored energy is great and has a lot of uses, like batteries for instance.
Power Pumps With Solar Energy
In the two illustrations previous, water was used for heating water and your home. To accomplish that task, you'll need to have a pump to circulate the water around. This pump would normally connect to your home's power supply, but let me give you this nice tip. You can use solar energy to run a DC motor that will slowly circulate the water throughout your home or in and out of your water heater. This way, the cost of the system is minimized further. Now, the skeptics will say that's great, but what do we do when there is no sun?
Good question! One way is to have normal power run a pump when there is no sun. You can also have a battery backup system that can run the pump and the battery could be connected to a solar battery charger.
