Carmine

Providing energy to your home in the form of solar powered electricity may be the way to go in the near future. Indeed, in states where sunlight is abundant many new family homes are coming with solar panels pre-installed. There are many grants, rebates and tax incentives in California and Florida, for example, to encourage the use of solar power to provide lighting in the home along with many other everyday appliances that use electricity. This article will discuss the 3 ways you can set up solar powered electricity system.

It may be a bit of a culture shock setting up a solar powered system in your home because most people take the supply of electricity for granted. The grid is in most homes in residential areas of most cities and this has been the source of electricity that people are used to.

The ultimate goal of setting up a solar powered system in your home is to free yourself from the grid. With this freedom will come savings on all your electricity bills. If this is not already an expensive monthly outgoing for you, it will be in the future. Fossil fuels will become harder to obtain in the future and the cost to create electricity with them will increase. This cost will be passed onto the consumer that accesses their electricity from the grid.

Thus the approach to take in freeing yourself from the grid is to wean yourself off it slowly.

The first way to set up a solar powered electricity system is to allow the utility companies that supply your electricity to set up your solar power system. This is commonly known as a grid connected system.

Solar panels are installed on your roof or some sunny part of the property that connect to an inverter that converts DC current to AC current. This connects to the standard electricity panel that records your electricity usage. In the case of the electricity that your solar panels generate, the meter will credit you (i.e. The usage reading will go down). This is balanced against your usage of electricity through the grid. Thus at the end of the month your monthly bill will be grid usage - solar electricity created. This will be a substantial saving depending on how many solar panels you have.

The next progression is to add a battery back up system to your solar powered system. The system is still connected to the grid but the battery can store power. This power can be used if there is a power cut or outage. Of course there are a few more components to this system. Apart from the battery units, there is also a charge controller that redirects the DC current to the grid when the batteries are fully charged. This system also requires more work from you, the owner of the system. You will have to maintain the batteries and set them up in a secure place away from children.

The final step is independence from the grid. This is known as a stand alone solar power system. As you become aware of the amount of electricity that is consumed in your home, the amount of electricity that each solar panel produces and how to operate and maintain the various components of the system then you can start fine tuning your system. The system will be free of the grid but will have a back up system, in the form of a generator or maybe some other form of renewable energy, like wind power or hydro power.

Thus you will be able to light your home and provide electricity for all your regular appliances without the utility bills dropping through your letterbox each month.

Solar power can be applied to many home and garden products. In recent years the cost of these appliances have become very affordable and saved you money on energy bills. Learn more about solar powered appliances at http://www.solarpowerappliances.com/ The site has features on solar pool heaters, outdoor garden lighting and solar ovens. Adrian Whittle writes about using solar power and appliances that can utilize renewable energy sources.