Book Review

Solar Power Your Home for Dummies
Rik DeGunther

Last month, on slashdot, I read an article about a guy that bought a bunch of broken solar cells on eBay cheap, and built himself a solar panel that drew 18 volts. It ended up being a fraction of the cost of a commerically built solar panel.

I thought it would be kind of fun to build myself a solar panel, just to do it. Since I have a number of projects I already need to finish, I figured this was something for another day, but I went to the library looking for a book that would have some ideas as to what exactly I would use my home built solar panel for. This is the book I found.

The author suggests as many different solar projects as he could think of, from cheap and simple to complex and expensive. He spent a lot of time talking about how what you really wanted to do was do an audit of you energy consumption, then see where you can reduce. (It makes the cost of any solar project that comes after go down, for one thing.) Other things he talked about were things like solar rooms, green houses, and changing the landscaping around your house to help cool things down in the summer.

I think I will eventually try to build myself a solar panel someday, but not before any of the other pending projects are done around here. I will very likely use it to hook it to an attic fan. I might also get some solar lights for the yard. Then I might think about putting up a green house on top of the new part of the garden that I created with my wall...

If you are sort of interested in doing a solar project, this is a good book to startr with. He has loks for helpful ideas and tips.