Solar Panels – Help Cut Energy Bills Plus Your Home’s CO2 Emissions

August 3rd, 2009 by Steve Evans

One glacier, the Trotting Glacier, liquefies more water in 24 hours than NY City consumes in a year and has receded 9 miles in 5 years. Proof can be found in the ice core records that provide CO2 and temperature levels as long ago as 650,000 years. Each fume from a smoke stack and combustion engine output contributes to the seventy million tons of CO2 that people release into the air every day. Our only hope for reducing its impact is to make an effort to seriously cut our CO2 levels.

Most households spend approximately 1/3 of their energy funds for heating water every day.

The utility companies supply the gas or electricity to heat the water for baths, showers, washing clothing, and many other things. However, the resources that are used to make this electricity or gas aren’t replenish-able and are increasingly harder to find as more natural resources are used up. This puts the pinch on the average household customer that is finding power and water bills continuously going up at above inflation figures. This can only continue as carbon-based fuels get harder to find and extract. For almost 100 years, a solar panel has been used to successfully heat up water.

It appears that the simplest application of solar energy that is currently available is solar electricity water heating. It merely requires using the principle behind the sun’s thermal rays to heat up water.

The solar panel is called the flat plate collector and batch collector systems. Flat plate collectors are just a chain of pipes that are positioned in an area of the house where they have access to direct daylight (often a southern exposure on the roof). Water comes through the pipes and the sun heats it up without any chemicals. The pipes are constructed so that they can absorb most of the sun’s heat.

A solar panel batch collector system is a water tank which has been changed to get the maximum out of the sun’s energy. This includes black surfaces that absorb the thermal energy. Surfaces of black that absorb thermal energy are included. Close to the home, and in an area that receives a lot of direct sunlight, is where the tank is located. The water supplied by either of these systems can then be used in the regular plumbing system of the house where it may be employed for common-or-garden use like showers, washing up the dishes and cooking. The upkeep cost is minimal and the system will last about ten to twenty-five years, although the purchase and installation cost of each system is expensive.

Dependent on how much hot water you use and how effective your house is in storing hot water, you might get back the purchase and installation costs inside 5 to seven years. You would also be contributing to the reduction of the amount of greenhouse gases that enter the atmosphere. And so these are some of the advantages and disadvantages of solar power.