I have a church member in intensive care over in NJ so I've crossed the Delaware several times in the past week. The town where the hospital is has solar panels on telephone poles: not all of them but a lot. I figure they are to light the street lights. Now this is in NJ, not some place with sun from April to November like CA, AZ or NV. There are less days of sun in NJ but those solar panels will still pick up power. The up front cost for a town would be steep but the long run savings would be great. I thought, "How cool is that!" which got me to thinking. (I know some of you are thinking, "Well duh Bob, but sometimes you have to see something to think about it.)
I do know this: there is some plastic in those things and plastic is make from petroleum products. But what a great way to use petroleum products while we still have some?
So, how much would it cost to have solar panels installed on the roof of the house? How much would it cost to make my own solar panels and put them up myself?
Some research and some answers later.
3 comments:
A while back, I bought this nifty little battery pack that provides emergency power on those all-too-frequent occasions when we have an outage. It will run two compact florescent lamps...enough to nicely light a living room...for 6 hours. It can also run a coffeemaker, which is even more important.
Anyhoo, it came with instructions on how to hook it up to a midsized solar panel, which could recharge it during the day in the event of a prolonged outage.
The whole array would put you back about four hundred bucks...but it's still cool to think off-grid.
Bob,
You might want to check out these guys.
http://www.limestonepresbyterian.org/solar/index.htm
They're only about thirty miles away from you.
You have a SouthWest facing wall on one of your buildings at Tully that might work okay for something like this. I'm guessing you might be able to pull about 30,000 Watts on a good day. You could do better if the pitch of the roof was a little higher and it was turned more toward the South. (I used Google Earth imagery for my guess)
Back in the late '70s I was really interested in Solar Energy research while I was at the University of Delaware. President Carter was a big supporter, but that all changed when President Reagan came into office. All the funding dried up with a quickness.
Kattie
I read about them when they got the job done. It cost them something like $800,000.00 which I know we don't have. But I do know that it is significantly less if you make and put up the panels yourself.
The Manse is probably Southeast/Northwest. I think.
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