You can cut your power bill pretty decently by building your own solar panels from broken cells (cosmetic flaws, but they still function) that are dirt cheap on ebay, and a wind turbine on the roof as backup.
You can hook it all up to your house and the power grid, and they'll pay you for the excess power you generate. Realistically you're not going to make any money off of it, but you can try to at least pay off or greatly reduce your own power bill.
You set it up so basically you're using your solar/wind primarily, but whenever it's not adequate your house just automatically uses the regular power you always had from the grid.
If I had a house and yard I'd totally be doing this. The solar panels are basically just a weekend project. Really not difficult to put together. You'll need batteries, but people are giving away old boat and car batteries all the time. Make a big bank of those on the side of your house.. like ten or twenty old batteries... they'll store enough.
Keep the regular grid, reduce the load on your own.... why doesn't every house do this? Why doesn't the government give everyone a stimulus check to pay for such things if they care about the environment so much? How about a Green New Deal where we just pay everyone to put up some solar panels in their yard or on their roof? You don't do anything ridiculous like make that the primary power source, but if everyone had a few solar panels, how much would that reduce the grid power usage? Grid is still there, just to be clear... nobody's taking that away..
You can buy complete panels for less than a dollar a watt. They are already dirt cheap.
You can invest in a diy system for about 10k for an average house and you will never have another electric bill.
They charge about 20 to install.
I priced them already.
Batteries are a different story. Life of batteries are pretty short except for “Edison” batteries and those are really expensive and heavy as shit. No “free shipping” on those
And you are correct about the wind as back up. We just went through more than a week with no power. Need a gigantic battery bank to run a house for a week without recharge.
You need a secondary backup. Always have a gas engine ready to roll out and plug in. A 3k - 5k genset is fairly inexpensive and most come with an RV plug which you can setup as an input to your house's electric system.
Someone has to pay for infrastructure. The grid tie in idea is basically trying to use the grid as a battery for free. No big if a couple parasites try it, catastrophic if solar becomes popular in an area.
You can cut your power bill pretty decently by building your own solar panels from broken cells (cosmetic flaws, but they still function) that are dirt cheap on ebay, and a wind turbine on the roof as backup.
You can hook it all up to your house and the power grid, and they'll pay you for the excess power you generate. Realistically you're not going to make any money off of it, but you can try to at least pay off or greatly reduce your own power bill.
You set it up so basically you're using your solar/wind primarily, but whenever it's not adequate your house just automatically uses the regular power you always had from the grid.
If I had a house and yard I'd totally be doing this. The solar panels are basically just a weekend project. Really not difficult to put together. You'll need batteries, but people are giving away old boat and car batteries all the time. Make a big bank of those on the side of your house.. like ten or twenty old batteries... they'll store enough.
Keep the regular grid, reduce the load on your own.... why doesn't every house do this? Why doesn't the government give everyone a stimulus check to pay for such things if they care about the environment so much? How about a Green New Deal where we just pay everyone to put up some solar panels in their yard or on their roof? You don't do anything ridiculous like make that the primary power source, but if everyone had a few solar panels, how much would that reduce the grid power usage? Grid is still there, just to be clear... nobody's taking that away..
You can buy complete panels for less than a dollar a watt. They are already dirt cheap. You can invest in a diy system for about 10k for an average house and you will never have another electric bill. They charge about 20 to install.
I priced them already.
Batteries are a different story. Life of batteries are pretty short except for “Edison” batteries and those are really expensive and heavy as shit. No “free shipping” on those
And you are correct about the wind as back up. We just went through more than a week with no power. Need a gigantic battery bank to run a house for a week without recharge.
You need a secondary backup. Always have a gas engine ready to roll out and plug in. A 3k - 5k genset is fairly inexpensive and most come with an RV plug which you can setup as an input to your house's electric system.
Not every power company allows this sadly and some just straight up charge static rates
Someone has to pay for infrastructure. The grid tie in idea is basically trying to use the grid as a battery for free. No big if a couple parasites try it, catastrophic if solar becomes popular in an area.
Many charge you just based on your profiled usage, not even your actual usage. This is one of the reasons for the move to smart meters.
Even that changes if you are dubbed a high user.
I know I'm dubbed a high user too which is really annoying since people are doing so much shit in their homes nowadays on my street.
No way to change that without basically cutting everything either.
Government is giving a 26% tax credit for solar already.
I wish I could. My HOA bans solar panels.
Just looked for broken panels on ebay and couldn’t find any. Do you have a link or a good search string to use?
Broken cells actually, not panels. You need to wire them together to make a panel yourself, but it's easy.