Since I was young, I have had a dream of getting my own house. And not just any house. I want it to be both beautiful and eco-friendly.
To be eco-friendly, or gentle on the environment, means a couple of things. First of all, you want to use sound and healthy building materials. You don’t want to introduce some toxic stuff in your home. For example: formaldehyde – a very dangerous compound – is found in certain types of particle board. Formaldehyde fumes make you really sick, even in low concentrations.
Another important aspect is how you heat the place. Where I live, electricity used to be very cheap some years ago. Naturally, this lead to enormous numbers of houses built with electric heating. As far as I understand it, this solution isn’t used much these days, as the electricity cost has increased a lot.
Oil – same story there. Back when I was a kid, I remember how everyone used oil to heat their home because it was cheap. The rising cost of oil is making this an expensive solution.
By spending a bit of money on better insulation, you can offset the rising energy bill. Back when energy was so inexpensive, there was a tendency to skimp on insulation when building houses. People didn’t care to put money into better insulation when oil was so cheap anyway.
It is different now. There are even cases where better insulation has reduced the energy cost by 50%. Believe it or not, there are super.insulated houses that hardly need any extra heating. In other words: put some cash into better insulation, and save money down the line.
What you’d really wish for would be a solar-powered house. If you could make use of all the sunlight that falls on your hose, you wouldn’t ever need any other energy. It could power your car, too.
In practise, this isn’t possible today. But in laboratories, scientists have reached a more than 40% efficiency with solar cells. In other words: these cells can transform nearly one half of the sun’s light into useful electric power.
Naturally, such super-efficient solar cells are extremely expensive as of now. But solar panels with more modest efficiency are mass-produced, and getting fairly inexpensive. Nowadays a number of manufacturers are producing photovoltaic cells with up to 20 per cent efficiency, using streamlined methods like continous printing.
If you want home solar panels you can also save money by assembling them yourself. Being able to put in a bit of your own work usually saves money when doing some type of home improvement.
And apart from the cash savings, you also have the satisfaction of being able to do your own thing.
Once installed, solar panels for homes typically are expected to last for over 20 years. So even if they cost some money upfront, you save on the utility bill in the long run.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.