Solar power systems used to be a little unreliable. If you were lucky, the solar panels on your roof would provide you with some supplemental heating, but most of the time it amounted to a little bit of hot water here and there, weather permitting. Solar systems were also expensive, requiring a great outlay of money to set up a system that might have given you payback in twenty years. These days, with advances in technology, and the available of many government grant and incentive programs, the situation is much much different.
According to some sources, more than 30,000 houses in the US shifted to off grid living in the past two years, bringing the total to about 180,000 households in the US alone. While some of these houses may indeed be in geographical zones that don’t have cold winters to worry about, many of them do face this realty every year. The secret of their success in using solar power systems is that they are usually used in combination with other systems, such as wind, and using active versus passive technology.
What differentiates active from passive technology is that while they both harness the power of the sun, passive systems mostly rely on some form of heat transfer whereby the energy or heat that is collected is transferred to something else, like a water system that then circulates the heat or it is stored in a tank. Active solar power systems on the other hand go one step farther, as the energy that is collected is stored by batteries and used to power an inverter that translates the energy in DC power, or electricity.
What is most interesting about active solar power systems is that these systems can also be connected to the electricity grid, so that this power feeds into the grid and is then fed back into your house through the usual electrical channels. While for some people this means that it reduces their dependency on the electrical grid, and this is reflected in their hydro bills, many people find that they are actually able to produce electricity which is in excess of their household needs. Now instead of just being an electricity consumer, these people have just become electricity producers. Somehow, solar power just got that much more interesting, didn’t it?
Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
- Related posts on Solar Power Systems
- Energy From Wind And Sun – For The Future | Internet Marketing …
- Solar Power Systems Produce Energy …