Solar Panels For Your House

You are probably familiar with calculators that have solar cells. These calculators don't have batteries and appear to work forever as long as they have enough light to keep them generated. Maybe you've seen larger solar panels on emergency road signs or call boxes, or even in parking lots to power lights. Although these larger panels aren't as common as solar powered calculators, they are out there.

Solar panels are instruments or devices that convert light into electricity. The devices are called solar panels because the most powerful source of light is the Sun. A solar panel is a collection of solar cells. Lots of small cells spread over a large area can work together to provide power or electricity. The more light that hits a cell, the more electricity it produces. On a bright, sunny day, the sun shines approximately 1,000 watts of energy per square meter of the planet's surface, and if that energy could be collected we could easily power our homes and offices for free.

Being able to provide electricity to your house isn't as simple as just slapping some solar panel modules on your roof, but it's not extremely difficult either. Not every roof has the correct orientation or angle of inclination to take advantage of the sun's energy. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, the solar panels should point toward true south. They need to be angled to absorb the maximum amount of energy year round. The solar panels should never be shaded by nearby trees or building, no matter the time of day or the time of year.

If you have a house with an unshaded, south facing roof, you will need to decide the size of the system that will work best for you. You will need to store the energy that you capture on sunny days in batteries so that you can have electricity on cloudy days. This will be an additional expense and may require some maintenance. One way around this problem is to connect your house to the utility gird, buying power when you need it and selling power to the utility company when you product more than you need for your house. Using this method, the utility company acts as a storage system.

While it's true that sunlight is free, the electricity generated by solar panel system is not. You have the cost of the hardware to set up the system and you also have the maintenance on the panels as well as the batteries, if that is how you are storing the power. Costs are coming down as more research is being done. Demand for more environmental friendly methods of producing electricity are making solar panels for your house an attractive alternative to conventional energy.