Watch Planet Green
Watch Planet Green on the Discovery Home Channel. There are a lot of myth busters on the show. You know myths that solar power is not a viable source of energy in cloudy areas. Wellllll, in cloudy, rainy Seattle a couple just built a home using solar collector tubes to heat their water. It’s so simple an idea you wanna smack yourself in the forehead like a V8 commercial.
The tubes are made of glass that contain parallel rows of smaller glass tubes along which are metal fins. There is no air inside so that the fins do not corrode easily and the tubes last a long time. The fins heat up and in this case in Seattle on a rainy/cloudy day of less than 60 degrees, the heat inside the tube almost doubles to 113 degrees in minutes. The water flowing through these pipes is indeed hot!
The other night there was featured a 7,000 sq. ft. home in a colder state like S. Dakota, Montana, etc. The homeowner used solar panels that cost him $34,000, but provided 90% of the energy to his home even in the winter. The trick is to incline the panels enough so that the snow slides off, the same principle as a roof. In this case a foot of snow slid off the panels in short time after the sun came up.
The price of solar panels is not all that staggering, and what a return on investment, as well as a tax write-off. I rounded the $34,000 up to $35,000 and divided by the 7,000 sq. ft. equals $5.00 per sq. ft.
That’s pretty good if a person has a large, large gas/electric bill every month. I do not. So the $7500 investment won’t pay for itself as far as utility savings for me for a long time, but as a resale feature, and with the tax write-off, I might be able to recoup all of that investment at once. There are a lot of different angles to look at. Of course the conservation and environmental issues are always important. To be free of the grid is a very good thing.
This is a very cool channel to watch where we can actually see the opposite of what we thought was the truth. There are all sorts of solutions out there that aren’t that expensive like soft beautiful carpeting made of recycled plastic bottles, that does not stain, and is cheaper. Once you’re done with it, it gets recycled again. I wonder if it would deter fleas too?
Soon to come on this channel, Leonardo DiCaprio will host a series, which will detail the making of a model green community called “Greensburg” I believe. There are, however, community models for solar power somewhere near Southern California that are not only off the grid, but generate excess solar power.
What I can’t figure out is if there are communities baked by the sun that can generate a massive amount of excess power, why can’t we just realign our power source centers in these areas to supply enough power everywhere? Because it seems that of the homes and/or communities I read about as solar powered experiments there is always have an excess of power. Islands habitats share both an abundance of sun and wind. Islands should be looking to immediately get off the grid via solar and wind power. I know Hawaii has passed legislation requiring all new homes have solar powered water heating systems, and they’ve had wind fields for quite a long time.
Check out the Discovery Home/Plant Green Channel. If you don’t get that subscription channel then goto: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/.