Posted by zog
on August 29, 2009, 3:04 pm
When people think of solar power, they usually think of solar PV panels which produce electricity. A full house PV rig is quite spendy, and a lot of people can't afford it, even with tax rebates. On the other hand, the "other" solar, solar thermal panels for making hot water, are gaining a new interest as they are much cheaper than solar electricity to purchase and install, and can do quite the job on helping with one major bill. As bonus, the new tax credits available are long term, good until 2016 for one third the price.
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090829/NEWS01/908290309
Get enough of those guys running, seems like you could do a good job on reducing the cost for home heating as well.
I was selling those units way back when this article was talking about,(making good scratch with it and also feeling good for what I was doing) and folks loved them, never had one complaint. The tax credits ending though just completely stomped that business flat.
*If* we had kept those tax credits running for say a decade more, that would have been enough to really transform this entire energy situation, and this nation now would be plastered with millions of roofs covered with tens of millions of both solar PV and solar thermal hot water and hot air panels, and the R&D efforts would be that much further along, and we would be right now loads more domestically self sufficient.
Instead, we went from OMG energy prices that spurred the solar boom (I am sure most of the boomers here and older remember that oil and gas sticker shock era), then, recognizing this economic threat, the big oil companies simply flooded, they Noah's Ark inundated the market with extremely cheap oil, so it squashed the new competition, then after it got squashed, they went right back to steadily rising prices and we got almost two generations behind in energy independence. We had a boom in good mileage vehicle back then as well, then that collapsed, remember that? My pickup is from 1981, right in the middle of those high energy prices era, 40 MPG. Tons of similar good mileage vehicles from back then, but that oil flooding deal to smash alternative energy brought back the gas guzzlers with a vengeance and more or less killed off most of the solar power industry.
Now we have to do it all over again. What a shame, 30 years behind technologically where we might have been. just to maintain that oil monopoly, with such things having this huge stealth (money AND blood) tax on oil, having to pay for this whopper military machine to always be poking around in the mideast (and I defy anyone to claim we aren't over there at least partially for oil supplies). Two trillion is the estimated cost of the two wars (already spent and projected), imagine if we had only used ONE trillion on maintaining energy credits to spur development of the alternatives? All the new business created would have more than paid back the credits in new taxes from many more domestic jobs, plus we would have a huge drop in balance of payment issues, our environment would be loads cleaner, and so on.
You can blow money, or wisely invest it, either way it is spent.
Heck, we all could maybe be driving decent quality electric vehicles by now that were recharged from solar carports and solar recharging decks and so on in the cities. When you go to work or some store or mall, instead of parking out in the hot sun, your vehicle sits in the shade under solar roofs, and you plug in while there. Stuff like that is what we could have had by now.
Oh well...but it's still better late than never to get "on the bandwagon" with a project for yourself. Making solar PV home made is hard, pretty much impossible, but solar thermal, hot water or hot air, can be done from plans or even buying it outright is much cheaper, and who knows whn they might pull the credits this time around.
There's just not all that much to it, an insulated box with either collection tubes or an actual multiple gallon tank, the box (one side glass obviously) sits in the sun and gets hot, this hot water comes into your "normal" hot water heater before you get it. If it's hot enough already, your normal heater doesn't come on, most of the time it works, even when it is cold outside during the day, you can get quite hot water out of the things. That's a very basic simplification of a system, but it way less complicated than solar PV.
Solar thermal can be used for normal hot water, there are more elaborate ones with separate inside insulated tanks and so on, or like using the hot water for radiant floor heating, or you can have just hot air collection panels and do room heating.
I built a very nice one of those once from my own design and got it installed on someones house, it worked just fine as an auxiliary heater for one room during the day, in the winter in new england.
I also helped work on a whole building hot air collector that heated a food coop store. Imagine just a narrow flat sort of greenhouse looking thing on the south wall, just a few feet thick. Stacked against the wall-staggered so air could circulate around them- were hundreds of 2 gallon steel containers that previously had cooking oil in them, recycled in other words, that were cleaned out, filled with a weak antifreeze solution, sealed tight, then spray painted flat black. They would sit there against the wall and absorb heat during the day, working as the solar thermal mass, then they ran a couple of fans at night and sucked that heat into the building to augment the system. That worked well too.
From what I remember, it only took a bit over *one month* in fuel oil savings to pay for the materials, and the members of the co-op did all the labor, which really was just normal carpentry, nothing exotic at all. After that, free energy for as long as the glass and steel cans lasted and a bit of electricity to run the fans, which again, could be run from a simple additional solar panel or two and battery set up.
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