Solar power
The sun
The sun heats our planet and makes all life possible.
Flowers use the sunshine and so can you. Basically there's two different uses, either you heat water and/or air for your home or you use photovoltaic cells to generate electricity to decrease your electricity bill in a eco-friendly way or completely take your house off the electricity grid. Heating liquid is generally more efficient then generating electricity, making heating the cheapest way to take advantage of the sunbeams. But electricity is often the most wanted energy addition for the regular household.
Electricity
Solar panels in a field.
A power tower.
The theory is simple. Using the energy from the sun, converting it to electricity and running applications off it. The panels is often built with wafer-based crystalline silicon cells or a thin film cell based on cadmium telluride and sealed in a case, protecting them from rain, wind, snow and other outer impact.
Heat
Heating liquid by collecting energy from the sun-beams can be done in different ways. One of the easiest devices is a tube or hose that is mounted s-shaped inside a box with a glass window to let the sun into the box and a black painted interior of the box to collect as much heat as possible. Connect this box to a reservoir and pump the water around, simple and cheap. This can be done in a number of ways at home by anyone.
More advanced systems can take advantage of parabolic discs to narrow the sun-beams to one spot to get better effectivity. Either with one big disc or with many mirrors following the sun and projecting the sun into one spot, a so called power tower. This heat can be used either to heat water or to make electricity by vaporizing water and leading the vapour through a turbine generator.
Do-It-Yourself
Building a solar tracker to keep the solar panels facing towards the sun at all times.
Designing a tiny solar power system for a pop-up camping trailer. (Lots of good know-how for all similar applications.)
Building an inexpensive solar heating panel.
Read more
CANSOLAIR, selling solar powered home ventilation and heating systems.