Piecing A Solar Power System Together

Q: I'm at the point that I'm ready to start planning my solar power system. I intend to put this system together a little at a time and yes, I'll be DIYing it to keep costs down. I thought I'd hit the group up for suggestions. Since one of my improvement projects here involves rewiring the house, this seemed the logical point to begin assembling the system. I'd like to put an inverter and charge controller in to be ready for up to 1200 watts in 24V panels. Any suggestions on equipment to use?

A: First of all James, you have to get down here in the real world. 1200 watts at 24 volts is only 240 watts at 120 volts. You can run 2 and 1/2 100 watt lights off of that :( But only when the sun is shining! First thing you gotta do is throw all that tree hugger crap out the window and forget saving the world! Green power don't mean doodlie! Get down to it. The easiest (and the cheapest) way to use solar power is to create heat. The easiest way to store that heat is water! Water will store 6 times more heat than earth or stone!!! Now your two highest bills are your heat bill and then your hot water bill. Average home this runs about $1500 a year for heat and about $240 a year for hot water. Range uses about $20 a year and Dryer about $50 a year. The rest of your electric bill is probably no more than about $20 a month! So attack those items first that are draining your assets! All of them have to do with heating something!!! So first off convert to propane if you got the dollars or natural gas and cut all the above in half! Next we will apply that $1,000 a year you will save to cut the gas bill by 80%!!!! Then and only then should you worry about solar electricity! Here is a good rule of thumb, if your electric bill is below $25 a month, that is the time to go solar! Get it there first!!!!! If you do get serious, a 24 foot by 4 foot solar furnace laced with 3/4 inch black pipe and covered by double insulated sliding glass door panels and surrounded by 8 inches of insulation on sides and bottom and 3, 4 by 8 foot mirror panels aimed at 36 degrees (or whatever your latitude is) facing due south will get up to nearly 190 degrees in the furnace and make a hell of a lot of hot water!!! Use 2 or 3 solar panels to run a DC pump and you have a system that will come on as the sun gets up and shut down as it sets automatically. Build yourself a storage tank about 10 feet wide and 24 feet long and 5 foot high, line it with one piece of rubber commercial roofing and surround it with 20 inches of insulation (I used Styrofoam) and fill it from roof rain runoff and you have a solar storage battery that will do you some real good! Use an old truck radiator as a heat exchanger and pipe it to your furnace and seal it and fill it with antifreeze and insulate the pipes. Soon you will have about 12,000 gallons of 170 degree hot water and a very quick recovery capability! Set another radiator in your tank and pump it with a very small electric pump (your gonna want this one to run day and night) to another radiator placed in your heat duct intake and hooked to a thermostat and all you will need to run on your heat unit is the fan (this should also be a closed system filled with antifreeze)! You just cut that $800 propane bill to less than $100. Run a 100 foot copper coil of 3/4 inch copper in your tank and hook it to you cold water and hot water inputs (you will need to bring another cold water pipe to where you join onto your hot water and place 2 mixing valves as 170 degree water will scald you!) and you just eliminated the $240 a year hot water bill! Heck you can even use an old heater core out of an old car to convert a gas dryer (tumbler runs off 110) and even eliminate the $50 a year there! If you build this yourself you can do so for less than $2,500 if your careful or you could spend about $150,000 to do it with panels :) You will still have your gas for convenience to cook and dry your clothes and back up heat, about 2 grand extra in your pocket, an electric bill of less than $30, plenty of time and money to explore stirling engines and PV panels, and heck, even the tree huggers got to love ya :)

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