If you have solar powered home, what do you like and dislike about it?
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I have a passive solar home. We use the sun for a good percentage of our heating in winter. Heat from the sun enters our energy efficient windows and is absorbed by our concrete or tile floors. Heat is stored there throughout the day and is re-radiated back out at night after the sun goes down and we close the insulated window blinds. Sometimes I dislike the hard surface flooring, as far as standing on it for long periods of time, but we have other areas of our home that are carpet, wood, etc. - that offer more resilience and comfort on joints.
We also have a 4.4 kW Photovoltaic array on our roof for solar electricity and a solar hot water heating system as well. There is nothing that I don't like about our systems. They integrate seamlessly into our household with zero maintenance so far. We don't even know they are there unless we are giving a tour of our home and someone asks about them. We have a grid-tied, net-metered system so we supply the utility company with power on sunny days, and use theirs on cloudy days and at night. Our system is sized so that over the course of a year, we will achieve a "net-zero" energy usage - meaning that we will supply the utility with an equal amount of electricity that they provide to us over the course of a year. They credit us when we produce and charge us when we use, so essentially at the end of the year, we break even, except for some taxes and a small "meter reading" fee.
Our plan is to convert our small car to an electric car so that we can charge it off of our solar panels as well.
Having our own electric production system, or "distributed generation" as the power company calls it, means that the utility company's power plants can be freed up to produce more electricity for my non-solar neighbors without building more power plants. The more houses the utility company does not have to provide electricity for, the less frequent we have to worry about brown-outs, etc.
I guess the only dislike I would have, is that we aren't totally off-grid and completely independent from the utility company, but then again, we'd have to worry about batteries and more maintenance if that were the case, so we're pretty happy at this point! I'd be happy to answer any specific questions about our system! Thanks!
From what I thought, solar powered homes require a lot of sunlight and a lot of windows. So, your privacy may suffer with that many?! Long shot, though...I am not 100% sure...
I like the refund check you'll get from the ComED Company,for selling back electric current.
SOLAR POWERED energy has yet to be engineered fully & in Malaysia it is widely used for water heaters only. What would be the ultimate is to be able to tap the natural sun resource & go full cycle of using solar energy. There ARE few countries ,,,isolated places,, that use solar energy for heating & lighting ,,,which is still "weak" & the power pack has yet to be fully designed & sold in the market. So hang on there , meanwhile u can have ur water heaters, some of the household lighting, garden lights, & simple utilisation of current for the SUN.
We have a solar water heater, and I truly don't understand why more people don't have them installed. It's great - and for over a year now, we have not once used the hot water electric heater as a back-up system. Loooong hot showers, even during the wintertime... Really they're great. Except for the up-front cost, it's free hot water...
I think that probably in a year or two, we'll fork over a battery system and photo cells for some power. I'm looking into a fiber-optic system for daytime lighting, but have yet to decide on that.
i like to have a solar powered house for me to have unlimited use of appliances. and if night comes theres no problem due to it would have a solar charger. but what if sun does not come out for 3 days or if there is a typhoon still i don't have the access. and what i like to it is that by using the solar i could help the environment to be good.
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