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Solar Power Ideas

Whether building a Container Home because of the green aspect or building it to become self reliant, Solar Power is a great way to accomplish both. You can use Solar Energy for heating your water as well as generating electricity.

The two types of conversion most used to convert sunlight in to power is Photovoltaic (PV) and Concentrating Solar Power (CSP). There are many things to consider when deciding which route to go such as:

  
    • Cost to build
    • Structure of your home
    • Functionality of Energy
    • Materials Used to build

Photovoltaic (PV)

Photovoltaics uses a solar cell to produce a direct current to convert light into electricity. Solar Cell Calculators are a basic example of this technology. This can also be seen on cars or houses with solar panels on the roof. When using Solar Power for your house you need four main components for producing solar power for your home: Solar Panels, Charge Controller, Battery and Inverter.

The Solar Panels themselves create energy by separating the negative and positive fields from light protons using different layers of Silicon. This creates a charge that can be sent to the Charge Controller, which regulates the ammount of currnet that will go to your Battery and DC Loads. The purpose of this is to keep your Batteries from getting too much current resulting in an overload. The Battery will also store power while there is no sun. The Battery then sends power to the Inverter which will invert the power in to AC Power which will allow the power to be used by the appliances in your house.

When using Solar Panels generating the maximum ammount of energy from your solar panels is a must. Dispite the sun being up for 14 hours on a normal day you generally ony get 6 hours of direct sunlight. This will increase in the summer and decrease in the winter, but will also be slightly different based on geographical location. One way to maximize the ammount of sunlight is to make sure your Solar Panels face to the true south.

An additional thing to keep in mind is how you wire your solar panels. If you use Series or Parallel wiring you can double the ammount of voltage that you are producing. The diagram below illustrates how you can use Parallel wiring in a four panel system.

Concentrating Solar Power (CSP)

Concentrating Solar Power uses a lense to concentrate the sunlight in to a small beam to provide a more concentrated sourse of energy. You can then use 2 methods for creating electricity, Concentrating Solar Thermal (CST), which uses the beam to produce heat, or Concentrating Photovoltaics (CPV), which uses the high concentration of light photons to produce energy. The Concentrating Photovoltaics technique uses the solar panels with an exterior lense to increase the hours of the day and intensity in which the light hits the Solar Panels to increase the ammount of energy created.

Concentrating Solar Thermal is used to produce heat to heat either water or gas to produce energy.

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