Solar Power Hardware For The Home?

angst_ridden_hipster writes: "OK, living in Southern California where the sun always shines (except this week) and the energy's getting scarce, the plan's become to put up a solar system at the new house. I'm well aware that there's no "economic sense" to buying a system like this -- even with the current rebates, it's more expensive than buying electricity elsewhere. It's more of a philosophical thing; I'd rather generate/buy expensive electricity than buy relatively cheaper electricity that results in more air pollution, etc. I recognize not everyone shares this philosophy, but that's not really what I want to discuss here. I want to talk hardware. In any case, I've been looking around online, and there's a lot of contradictory and incomplete information." Would some of you folks out there who happen to work with solar power hardware care to clear up some of the contradicitons?

"Based on what information I have been able to find, here's what I think I'll need:

Current usage is a squanderous 10kWH/day average. I'm figuring that a 1kW system would probably handle around half of that on sunny days. I figure doing a grid-tied system is probably the cheapest/easiest, and I'm not too concerned about maintaining backup power when the grid's down. (A grid-tied system basically pumps any energy that you generate and you don't use out onto the grid, turning your meter back... you sell to the Electric Co. In order to protect the line workers, it doesn't output any energy when the grid's down.) That leaves me with some consumer-oriented system like the Trace Engineering Sun Tie system, ten Siemens SR100 panels, plus cables, mounting hardware, lightning arrester, and some form of PV ground fault interrupters.

Is this a reasonable system? Does anyone know about better/cheaper/more-efficient configurations? Anyone have any suggestions and/or experience on this stuff?"

Comments

Re:Pollution

[Mr. Slippery]

I understand your motivation, but are you aware that a solar cell takes more energy to manufacture than it will produce over its working life?

Not true. It takes from one to several years to break even, depending on the technology, but the claim that they take more energy than they put out is pure FUD.

Also, if you're far enough away from the grid it can actually be cheaper to install a photovoltaic system than to run copper and get on the grid.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/