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Solar Panels for Your Home
With all the hullaballoo surrounding fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, it really is time to start looking for other ways of powering your home. But just because you don’t live next door to a nuclear power station, that doesn’t mean that you’re cut off from sustainable, renewable energy. The idea of a solar revolution has been drifting about for a good while now, and it’s one of the easiest ways for you to get directly involved with sustainable energy. Here’s all you need to know about solar panels and how to incorporate them into your home.
Solar panels are flat, shiny plates made from a highly-reflective material like silicon crystal. In a home, they are usually found on a roof, or on the south-facing wall of the house – but don’t worry, solar panels can be placed anywhere that catches the sun.
The most modern designs of solar panels, known as PV solar panels, contain positive and negative layers of silicon crystal. This means that some layers have too many electrons, and some have too few. The electrons want to be found in equal numbers in each layer, so move around in order to even themselves out, creating electricity as they go. Here’s the clever part: the light and heat energy from the sun speeds this process up, meaning that electricity is created much faster and on a larger scale.
While this is all very well and good, you might be wondering how solar panels can help you. Well, solar panels can be used in a couple of ways to make everyday life a little easier, greener and cheaper. Firstly, they can be used in order to provide electricity, powering all things electronic inside your abode. However, they can also be used to heat your home, as the energy from the sun can be used to heat water within your central heating system.
How can I get my hands on a couple of solar panels?
As I mentioned above, you need to get solar panels fitted onto your house. This can be quite expensive, as it can cost up to £5,000 to get panels installed. However, there are grants available from the government to help with the cost of installing solar panels, as they promised to make sure that at least 15 per cent of our energy comes from renewable resources by 2020. In addition, energy suppliers such as British Gas offer packages like mySolar Energy, which aim to help customers with the switch over to renewable energy. In fact, you can even get paid for adding solar panels to your home. Any electricity you generate but don’t use gets fed back into the National Grid, and you could cash in on it!
Article by Connor Sephton, 29th November 2011. Content correct at the date of publication.
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